eso log

I really would like to the stats like this.

Also stats what races, classes etc. were created. Another big MMO released this some years ago, super interesting!

Why would players ever need to know this information? Would it make them enjoy the game more to know the population is stable? Would it make them quit if they see a drop in population? What possible benefit could there be for the players in knowing this?

I think some are just looking for proof that the game is dying.

I think the only way to measure population is by "gut feeling" and posting on the forum about it. If you are upset with the game, the population is dying because everyone else is upset at the same thing you are. If you are happy or content with the game, the population is fine. If Steamcharts shows whichever of those you are trying to prove, the numbers are real. If it doesn't, those numbers are completely made up and don't show any reliable data. Then, wait a week or so for the next thread about the game's population.

In the Steam charts, you can see pretty clearly when ESO went on sale on Steam in late 2016 or so. After a while, I'd guess maybe from 2018/9 on, these charts probably give a decent comparison of the ups and downs on PC (with the assumption that the general pattern of players who don't use Steam doesn't swing wildly from those on Steam). It doesn't give a total number, though, as there is a native PC client that doesn't go through Steam, and we have basically no idea what the numbers there are.

Even if you would count players in an instance on PC, I doubt you can do that for multiple instances. Especially in hubs (maybe except for the dead of night) you can usually assume that there are more than one instances running.

mmo-population doesn't count players at all. It counts mentions of the game on social media, searches on Google, and things like that. I have no idea how they arrive at player count from that, but I wouldn't take those at face value.
It may be useful to get a picture of how interest in one game develops over time (and again, I wouldn't necessarily draw a comparison between games from that, except for "activity on social media"), but not actual player count.

In the end, we can guess how activity in the game evolves over time - the only halfway decent numbers are from Steam, and that's not the complete picture.

Everyone I know that plays the game uses the native client. Steam just adds an extra layer for failure when it comes to logging on.

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

Every single online game I've ever played has always had a loud contingent arguing that "the game is dead" and that each new change is evidence of desperation, greed, end-of-service, and a mass exodus of players.

This is a well known occurence in online gaming and I don't know how or if we can change that. I just don't buy into it.

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

fizzybeef wrote: »

There are numerous threads and people saying the game is dying population wise and myself have the opinon the population is becoming less too. I measured this in terms of what i see in zones, formerly active guilds becoming 40/500 people online guilds in prime time, group finders and queue times are insanely slow, pvp bars are 1-2 max in the prime time on the server (PS EU).
But overall aside of the steam charts wich only work for PC there are no real tools to measure it or ? I know PC has some Add ons to check how many players are in the area? But aside of that only ZOS can track it right? Or are there ways and indicators i have missed?

That is a really good question.
The best-case scenario would be for ZOS to release their actual login numbers but that isn't going to ever happen.

IMO Steam Charts is probably the best way to estimate population trends. The information on Steam Charts goes back to 2014 so it is likely to be a good sample of the ESO population as a whole. If we knew exactly what percentage of the ESO PC population was on Steam then we could extrapolate the true population of ESO.

Then there is https://mmo-population.com/ which does a rather fuzzy estimate of login populations. I wouldn't trust the numbers exactly, but they may be useful for comparing population numbers across platforms.

@Renato90085
ESO Logs as in (https://www.esologs.com/)?
I think that's good way to measure endgame PvE players but not casuals or PvPers.

I heard once, that Steam just makes up about 10-20% of the total Population. As most people run ESO with the official launcher.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

If you want to use Steam Charts to get a sense of any particular game's player population size, then you need to understand-- and, if possible, try to compensate for-- a number of concurrent facts that can work against each other.

First, let's consider time of day. I'm looking at Steam Charts right now, and the very first thing it shows on the Charts Overview is the number of Players Online, and the chart appears to cover a 72-hour (3-day) period. As might be expected, the number of players who are online via Steam at the same time as each other fluctuates throughout the day. What I find interesting is that this number appears to follow a consistent pattern over the 3-day period, peaking between 10:00 AM and 10:30 AM each day, then bottoming out between 7:00 PM and 4:00 AM. I'm not sure which time zone those times are for, but if I assume that they are according to the time zone I've selected in my computer's system settings, then they are in Eastern Standard Time USA. If that's correctso,

I posted before finishing and cannot get the edit gear to come up, so am trying to finish as a reply.

If that's correct, it's interesting to me that the peak is in the mid-morning hours (EST), whereas the lowest population is during the "prime-time" hours of evening, night, late night, and pre-dawn early morning hours-- in other words, it's roughly the reverse of what I personally would have expected. We would need to break the population down across the various world time zones to understand how the online numbers track for each particular time zone, look at which time zones contain the greatest bulk of the players using Steam, etc. For instance, maybe for just the players in my time zone the pattern sort of fits what I would expect-- people playing online in the evening and night, after coming home from school or work-- but maybe the population in other time zones is greatly outweighing my time zone and making the overall peaks and valleys end up at different times of day than I would have expected? It isn't enough to simply look at the numbers if we intend to "use" them for some meaningful purpose; we also need to understand why they are as they are.

Now, if we look at the Steam Charts for ESO over the last 7-day period, we see a similar pattern of peaks and valleys. But it's interesting that the peak appears ti be at around 3:00 PM each day, whereas the valley is around 3:00 AM. Again, I assume the times are according to my computer's time zone setting (EST). The daily valleys for ESO do fall within the daily valleys for all games, but toward the tail end. And the daily peaks for ESO do not coincide with the daily peaks for all games. So these two patterns are sort of working against each other, by which I mean that ESO's population of concurrent players doesn't peak and bottom out in step with the overall population for all games, but is roughly shifted by about 5 hours-- unless the times for the charts are by different time zones which are 5 hours apart, such as EST and GMT. But if we assume that the charts are for the same time zone, we might want to understand how the times when most of ESO's players are online at the same time as each other (concurrent players) differs from the times when most of Steam's users overall are online concurrently, and ask if that difference needs to be taken into account at all. Maybe not, or maybe what it means is that we might need to include other sources than Steam to get a better sense of ESO's actual population?

But ignoring that for now, if we look at the 1-month chart for ESO, we see that the timing of the peaks and valleys appears to be very consistent and dependable, meaning ESO's Steam population consistently peaks at roughly 3:00 PM each day.

If we zoom out to the 3-month view, the daily peaks and valleys disappear, but we can see that there are peaks and valleys on a weekly basis. In particular, the peaks seem to occur on Saturday and Sunday, whereas the valleys are during the work week or school week (Monday through Friday), which makes sense.

We can see that the number of concurrent ESO Steam players increased during the first part of April, which presumably tracks with the opening weeks of the Night Market, then after a couple of weeks the numbers started to decline. According to the listed numbers below the chart, the average number of concurrent players for the last 30 days is still pretty high compared to the months before April, but not as high as in April, and the downward trend throughout May indicates that the reason for the average being as high as it is comes from all of the concurrent players at the very end of April and beginning of May. It makes sense to me that as players got what they wanted out of the Night Market, the population started to decline.

We can also see seasonal variations from month-to-month over the years, with the annual peaks typically-- but not always-- being in the spring months. This would track with the release of major updates around that time every year.

But the most important fact throughout all of this is that the numbers are for concurrent players. Why is that important? Consider the increase in numbers during the first half of April. There are two ways to explain it-- (1) the Night Market drew in new players who decided to try ESO or old players who had left and decided to return, but not everyone stayed; or (2) there are actually the same number of players as before, but they were playing for much longer sessions during the first few weeks of the Night Market, creating more overlaps between the play sessions of all players and making the concurrent number go up, then it went back down as players began returning to their usual shorter play session lengths and there are less overlaps as a result. I would think there's a bit of both going on-- the number of players fluctuates for various reasons; and within the core group of people who play ESO pretty much every day or every week there are variations in how long their play sessions last, causing the number of concurrent players within that core group to fluctuate. So basically, we shouldn't view a decline in the number of concurrent players as indicating some sort of "mass exodus," because the number of logins might be roughly the same yet shorter play sessions are making it look like fewer logins.

tl;dr: IMO concurrent player numbers is not a useful metric and does not furnish players with any agency.

Player population =/= game death. The game will die when MS decides that is time, regardless of player population at the time.

ESO may have what seems like a healthy/active population and they may still go ahead and pull the plug for business reasons that unless one of the few remaining independent journalists goes digging into we will probably never know.

Conversely they might keep it running on 'life support' indefinitely again for business reasons that we can only infer (because they won't be willingly made public).

From a player perspective I think 'am I enjoying what the game currently has to offer' is a more important metric than concurrent player numbers; I understand that is easy to fall for the the sunk cost fallacy and other psychological trappings that the game, as means of survival mind you, might foster but ultimately what should matter is the here and now.

For those players like myself that have developed personal relationships in/through the game all I can recommend is to, if possible, foster those outside the game as well so ESO is not the only binding element.

This works pretty well to mitigate the 'existential anxiety' derived from one's friendships being tied to the viability of the game which ultimately is completely outside our control.

Furthermore it is unlikely that something will be brought to light which completely recontextualizes one's past experiences in the game - at least from the game publisher's side - thus is unlikely that memories of past enjoyment will be poisoned by present/future events.

Coming to terms with the fact that despite 'demanding' a significant commitment that does not make ESO an 'investment' - and adjusting accordingly - worked for me.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I posted before finishing and cannot get the edit gear to come up, so am trying to finish as a reply.

The edit gear is still there but it's invisible, like the icons next to our name at the top of the page. Just click around the area where it belongs to find and use it.

This has been going on for 2 weeks now.

Gabriel_H wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

Every single online game I've ever played has always had a loud contingent arguing that "the game is dead" and that each new change is evidence of desperation, greed, end-of-service, and a mass exodus of players.

This is a well known occurence in online gaming and I don't know how or if we can change that. I just don't buy into it.

Elite Dangerous released a new update recently. Several of the comments on Steam noted it was laughable a "dying game" was getting updates.

Jaron Lanier has some very insightful things to say about why gamers claim a game is dying, and other interesting observations. I won't post them here but they are easy to find.

Luneca wrote: »

Yet, instead here we have them ignored. And do not go "oh well tomes was supposed to do that." It doesn't accomplish that becuase two players that want to play together can have completely different challenges, and once one does them, there's no incentive to do any more of them.

Other than them being friends? I constantly run content I don't need to run because I have friends who want to run it.