Accurate Daily Active User Count?

[rexi.1349]

Is there anywhere I can get an accurate count of daily active users? The numbers seem to be all over the place everywhere I look. Is there a more official source?

[kharmin.7683]

As far as I know (and remember), Anet has never released that data.

 

EDIT:  Why?  What would be the purpose of publicly releasing that information?

Edited April 20, 2022 by kharmin.7683

[rexi.1349]

10 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

EDIT:  Why?  What would be the purpose of publicly releasing that information?

 

There have been a couple communities actively being negative about the game, stating that it's dead and nobody plays it anymore. I would just like to have factual analytical data that proved otherwise.

[kharmin.7683]

1 minute ago, JWaggz.5862 said:

 

There have been a couple communities actively being negative about the game, stating that it's dead and nobody plays it anymore. I would just like to have factual analytical data that proved otherwise.

Ah, well, I'd expect people in those communities don't even log in to GW2.  Maps are populated, although depending on time of day and event schedules, some may be less populated than others.  It is true, from what I hear, that both PvP and WvW have had some population issues but overall, my highly subjective experience is that there are plenty of players engaged in GW2.

I believe that there are industry reasons why studios like Anet don't release hard numbers to the public.

[Khisanth.2948]

After the Steam release we'll get a very inaccurate count 😛

[rexi.1349]

XD true true. I'm just glad the community here is mostly a calm, cool-headed and welcoming community regardless of player count.

[DarcShriek.5829]

6 minutes ago, JWaggz.5862 said:

 

There have been a couple communities actively being negative about the game, stating that it's dead and nobody plays it anymore. I would just like to have factual analytical data that proved otherwise.

Ignore them.  There have always been and always will be people that try to convince others that GW2 is dead.  People have been proclaiming GW2 to be a dead game since the first week.  Obviously, these people were wrong.  Drama sells on the internet and these people are just using drama to get attention.

[AgentMoore.9453]

20 minutes ago, JWaggz.5862 said:

Is there anywhere I can get an accurate count of daily active users? The numbers seem to be all over the place everywhere I look. Is there a more official source?

The closest thing we have officially is that there are apparently '16 million players', as that's the number boasted on GW2's landing page.

Unfortunately, we have no idea what they mean by 'players'. Is it 'all players period', or do they mean 'active players' or do they just mean 'accounts' or 'accounts created since 2012'. I've heard that an 'active player' is defined as 'an account that logs in and then loads fully into a map', but that can just as easily be one person who logs 40-200 accounts to collect their daily log-in rewards before logging right back out (this is a thing people do in alarming numbers and log-in rewards were confirmed by devs recently to be the primary source of Mystic Coin generation across the entire game).

So, how many people play GW2? The most extreme optimistic estimate is 16 million. But it depends on how you define people and whether you're factoring in activity and whether you're counting the same person multiple times.

[mythical.6315]

There’s no official source of active users. What you’ll see is some sites basing it off of those who use their tool (e.g. think Steam although it’s not available for it yet) or those that do some mathematical gymnastics using uncorrelated data to come up with a population (i.e. mmo-population.com using Reddit subscriber count). 

Edited April 20, 2022 by mythical.6315

[Healix.5819]

9 minutes ago, AgentMoore.9453 said:

Unfortunately, we have no idea what they mean by 'players'.

They mean accounts. https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/celebrating-nine-years-of-guild-wars-2/

For comparison, they had 1 million pre-purchases in 2012, 2 million the second week of launch, 3.5 million for the 1 year anniversary, 5 million prior to going free, 7 million for HoT, 11 million for PoF and 16 million for the 9 year anniversary.

[Danikat.8537]

There's no official numbers, as far as I know most MMOs don't publish those these days.

It's also generally not worth arguing with people like that. According to some people online absolutely everything is proof that every MMO is dead or dying. Even if you could provide them with factual information either it would never be good enough or they'd say the company was lying about the numbers, or they'd come up with some kind of reason why the number of people playing is nothing to do with a game being dead. They just want to complain and will do it no matter what.

[Freya.9075]

Ppl complain about “dead” games all the time. Even when they are well populated. You can see how populated it is by playing the game. Your own experiences are what matters. Not what other ppl think they know about the game. 

[TheNecrosanct.4028]

2 hours ago, JWaggz.5862 said:

 

There have been a couple communities actively being negative about the game, stating that it's dead and nobody plays it anymore. I would just like to have factual analytical data that proved otherwise.

All you need to do is 2 things. Define for yourself what contitutes a dead game. Then, log in and see if the game fits your definition.

I can do meta's every single day and for most of them I don't need to LFG. I can call for help in map chat and people will come. I can post in LFG for raids, strikes or fractals/dungeons and a party or squad will be formed within minutes. Just these 3 things to me mean this game is far from dead. I don't need to know actual statistics to come to this conclusion. Now maybe this is not "alive" enough for some people, but those people apparently use a different definition than I do. Most of the time when I read these claims, though, I just see uninformed people. They're like a bad Wikipedia page. A lot of them are blatantly obvious in that regard and about 5% are the smart ones who can string together an argument and make it seem plausible, except when held up against actual research results. I've been playing this game for a decade and the "most dead" I've ever seen it was the content drought before and after the release of HoT. And even then I had no problems doing all the (group) content I've always done in this game, so it's still relative.

[Khisanth.2948]

The more meaningful metric is revenue. It doesn't matter if your daily concurrent player count is 100 million players if you aren't getting any money from them and for that you can check https://kr.ncsoft.com/en/ir/irArchive/earningsRelease.do

[LucidHarmoy.6284]

I play the game daily and barely see anyone, a couple people per map, maybe a bunch of people afk in a city but I doubt this game is populated at all. Infact out of lost ark, wow, ff14, runescape, black desert online or pretty much any mmo I've played in the last few years this game feel by far the least populated. 
Pvp has 2000 players, to get into the top 250 you only need to be gold which shows how low the engagement of that is. No one plays dungeons, no one plays raids except a few small groups. Strikes are played a bit more and fractals a bit more but generally no one plays this game. There isn't many dedicated raiding groups, fractal groups nor pvp guilds. 
And before anyone says oh there's alot of x groups, if there's less than 50 groups at a time, that's extremely EXTREMELY underpopulated, and that's not even close to how many groups there are raiding or any of the content. It's kittening dead
Edit: And I play on EU the more populated region by far

Edited July 10, 2022 by LucidHarmoy.6284

[Silent.6137]

17 minutes ago, LucidHarmoy.6284 said:

I play the game daily and barely see anyone, a couple people per map, maybe a bunch of people afk in a city but I doubt this game is populated at all. Infact out of lost ark, wow, ff14, runescape, black desert online or pretty much any mmo I've played in the last few years this game feel by far the least populated. 
It's kittening dead

Let's just assume there's only 10 players per hour on each of these maps at any given time, and ignoring certain maps like DragonStorms, Activities, Instances, etc.:

62 Zones/Maps @ 10 players/map/hr = 14,880

4 Lobbies & 9 Lounges = 13 @ 10/hr = 3,120

9 Dungeons = 2,160

7 Raids, 12 Strikes, 10 DRMs and 8 Fractals (4 Tiers and 4 Rec)= 8,880

14 PvP maps = 3,360

9 WvW linked servers @ 30/hr(10 for each server) = 6,480

Number of players per day = 38,880 x 2(NA & Eu) = 77, 760

Sure, each players do not log on for just 1 hour but we also know there are more than 10 on each map per hour. And we are ignoring all multiple instances of the same map. Also, the total number playing daily are probably a few times more than 10 per hour. So, regardless of how empty the maps may seem, there are more playing per day than we think. Do all the MMOs you mentioned, like Black Desert, has as many maps and instances to spread the players out? I think not.

GW2 may not be as populated as most of those you mentioned but it's hardly on life support atm.

[Randulf.7614]

There’s me and all of you.

[Nightcore.5621]

When i Play ff14 Than come back in GW2 Than GW2 feel really dead as a mmo

[mythical.6315]

3 minutes ago, Nightcore.5621 said:

When i Play ff14 Than come back in GW2 Than GW2 feel really dead as a mmo

Well that’s because of how incredibly popular that FF14 is compared to GW2. 

[Silent.6137]

If GW2 is constantly being compared to the most popular MMOs around, then it's still in a very good position.

[Kikokuma.9405]

GW2 is far from dead. They got a huge influx of players coming into the game from the great WoW purge. How many of those they keep is up to how they continue to change the game in the coming months. My guess is GW2 is more populated than ever before (maybe except for initial release) but also the game is in one of the worst states it's ever been in. Meaning they got lots of players, but also more are leaving the game than ever before. So they need to stop the bleeding which they seem to be having trouble with. 

[vanfrano.1325]

I see people pretty much everywhere except on EoD maps (minus Arborstone) but I gotta say that the game feels a lot emptier since EoD. I play a lot less myself.

But I always found GW2 more lively than FFXIV. I mean, FFXIV is packed indeed, if you're looking for bots (even more than here), RMTs, afk players showing off and prostitutes idling in town but that's it.

[mythical.6315]

26 minutes ago, Silent.6137 said:

If GW2 is constantly being compared to the most popular MMOs around, then it's still in a very good position.

I wouldn’t hold much weight to whether something is or isn’t in a good position solely based on it being compared to something popular. We could compare K-Mart to Target but that wouldn’t mean that K-Mart is in a good position. 

[Silent.6137]

10 minutes ago, mythical.6315 said:

I wouldn’t hold much weight to whether something is or isn’t in a good position solely based on it being compared to something popular. We could compare K-Mart to Target but that wouldn’t mean that K-Mart is in a good position. 

When you're comparing in the sense of competitors for the same base, and also consider the game as a top tier game, then it is very relevant. Top-tier as being in top 10 or close to it. If GW2 is being mentioned in the same breathe as all those obscure games that hardly anyone knows about, then there'll be very good reasons to be concerned

Your example of K-Mart and Target is really not relevant. Both companies are owned by the same group, but target different clienteles, i.e. K-Marts sell lower qualify and cheaper versions from Target.

[mythical.6315]

3 minutes ago, Silent.6137 said:

When you're comparing in the sense of competitors for the same base, and also consider the game as a top tier game, then it is very relevant. Top-tier as being in top 10 or close to it. If GW2 is being mentioned in the same breathe as all those obscure games that hardly anyone knows about, then there'll be very good reasons to be concerned

Your example of K-Mart and Target is really not relevant. Both companies are owned by the same group, but target different clienteles, i.e. K-Marts sell lower qualify and cheaper versions from Target.

You can try to focus on the differences but it doesn’t change what I said. You cannot say something is or isn’t successful solely on it being compared to something else that is successful. It does not work like that. 

Edited July 10, 2022 by mythical.6315