"gUiLD WaRs 2 iS a dEAd GAme"

[deathdealer.2197]

8 hours ago, Captain Sally.6249 said:

Very nice. Now let's see those PvP numbers.

500

[Dawdler.8521]

31 minutes ago, deathdealer.2197 said:

500

499 bots and one really, really serious pvper.

[deathdealer.2197]

Just now, Dawdler.8521 said:

499 bots and one really, really serious pvper.

And he is very upset

[Ratnoon.4251]

Guild Wars 2 is not dead, as a matter of fact it's doing decent compared to it's competition. 
The genre however is dying. This new generation of gamers have the attention span of a squirrel, and therefor need the constant dopamine injection.
Guild Wars 2 won't provide that, no MMOs do really.

Edited August 22, 2023 by Ratnoon.4251

[Danikat.8537]

17 minutes ago, Ratnoon.4251 said:

Guild Wars 2 is not dead, as a matter of fact it's doing decent compared to it's competition. 
The genre however is dying. This new generation of gamers have the attention span of a squirrel, and therefor need the constant dopamine injection.
Guild Wars 2 won't provide that, no MMOs do really.

Where did you get that info from?

I know 'live service' games have proven less popular in recent years, but I think that's outside of the MMO genre and more to do with the fact that it seemed to mean companies trying to force "micro"transactions and various forms of subscription services (including season passes) into games where it didn't really fit, especially traditional single-player and small multiplayer games. But that's almost the opposite, it was players objecting to the idea of being pressured to play a bit every day and keep up with new reward streams because they just wanted to focus on the actual game. A lot of the biggest games this year, like Jedi Survivor, Tears of the Kingdom and Baldurs Gate 3 are more traditional, gameplay focused action or RPG games.

[Ashen.2907]

If GW2 has 15 million active players then, according to publically available revenue data, very very few of them buy expacs.

Edited August 22, 2023 by Ashen.2907

[Taclism.2406]

21 minutes ago, Ratnoon.4251 said:

The genre however is dying.

The novelty of MMO's is gone now everything is always online / has online play
 Eg, your "new generation" has plenty of MMO-like options, such as modded minecraft servers and likely other alternatives I'm too old to know.

As for the "join X amount of players", yeah thats account created, not even "account that logged in the game at least once". Thats a norm across the industry, gaslighting for investor meetings & gullible consumers.  Like how Blizzard reported 100 millions users on hearthstone in 2018. 

(Also we'll see where the number lands for gw2 once you the rewards for logging in are gone, that'd be a much more accurate daily user measurement)

[Danikat.8537]

4 minutes ago, Taclism.2406 said:

(Also we'll see where the number lands for gw2 once you the rewards for logging in are gone, that'd be a much more accurate daily user measurement)

That depends on how much 5 Astral Acclaim is worth. It might still be worth taking a few minutes to log into an alt account every day even if it's not as profitable as now. I'm sure someone will work it out pretty much as soon as SotO goes live.

[Hex.2840]

Daaaayum 15 million? So uhhhhhh where they at? 

[Gibson.4036]

Really, does it matter?

In the end, are you having fun playing it or not? If you are, then there's enough population, whatever it might be. If you aren't, doesn't matter if it's the most populous MMO that exists.

This is true up until they turn off the lights and put up the chairs.

[Birdie.3869]

17 minutes ago, CSArmory.8319 said:

Daaaayum 15 million? So uhhhhhh where they at? 

It's all the afk farming bots at sandswept isles and such I'm betting.

[Danikat.8537]

I know it wasn't a serious post anyway, but it's worth bearing in mind that you'll never see everyone who is online or be able to tell how many there are, because of the mega-server system. The game will make as many copies of each map as required for the people who want to go there (I think the cap is normally about 150 people per map instance) and there's no way for players to know how many copies of each map there are.

Later today it's a safe bet more people than usual will be online and a lot of them will be going to the first SotO map, but you could still end up in one that seems relatively quiet if you get there just after a new one is created. (Or after a meta-event ends when everyone is clearing out.)

But as @Gibson.4036 said it doesn't really matter. The important thing is whether there's enough people for what you want to do.

[AliamRationem.5172]

11 hours ago, Arnox.5128 said:

GuildWars2.com main page (on the carousel) currently boasts 16 million players, probably monthly. Even if they were completely talking out of their butts and it was only a third of that, that's still ~5 million players. Just to give some context for that, WoW reached an all-time peak of ~12 million players in 2010.

Now, you guys can argue all you want to about semantics, and I could be wrong about these numbers here, but judging from all this and also my years of playing this game, I believe it. You can decide what you want to believe and how pessimistic you're going to be.

Wow reached an all-time peak of 12 million active subscriptions.  I'd believe that GW2 has 16 million accounts.  The difference is that would presumably be accounts for all-time and including free and inactive accounts, whereas WoW peaked at 12m x ~$15 = $180 million from a single month just from subscription payments.  I believe GW2's highest all-time revenue was something like $20 million?  That seems pretty good, but it's still like comparing apples to elephants.

[Stx.4857]

Whenever I try to find a group in the LFG there’s between 0 and 5 posted at any given time.  Usually when I play which is late evening on the west coast, there are 0 groups.  The game certainly does *feel* dead.  

[Vayne.8563]

14 minutes ago, Stx.4857 said:

Whenever I try to find a group in the LFG there’s between 0 and 5 posted at any given time.  Usually when I play which is late evening on the west coast, there are 0 groups.  The game certainly does *feel* dead.  

And yet when I post in looking for group, the groups fill up very quickly.  At almost any time of day.  There are things people don't use lfg for, so I don't know where you're looking, but I'd say the problem is that groups that are posted fill up fast and they're gone and everyone else sits around and looks without posting in it.  What categories are you looking in? What groups are you trying to find?

[Danikat.8537]

12 minutes ago, Stx.4857 said:

Whenever I try to find a group in the LFG there’s between 0 and 5 posted at any given time.  Usually when I play which is late evening on the west coast, there are 0 groups.  The game certainly does *feel* dead.  

Depending on how late you mean that might be the problem. I'm in the UK, so further west than most people on the EU servers and I notice a big drop-off in activity about 10-11pm. If a meta-event has already started people will stick around to finish it, and sometimes there are exceptions but generally I don't expect to start anything that needs more than 5 people later than 10. Unless I stayed up late enough for the Oceania players to get online, but I'm not sure when exactly that is, I just know a lot of WvW servers have an 'overnight' squad and I've heard the same happens in PvE.

[Gravitron.7982]

6 hours ago, jokke.6239 said:

Arena Net says "Join 15+ million players"

Seems like they just took that number

But that's accounts created

Not active players

Yup, WoW did the same, ESO does the same, EQ1 did the same I believe. It's a common marketing strategy used to portray the entire game as a giant player base, so the customer thinks "Wow 15 milion people are playing this? Now I gotta play it!". But it does not mean 15 million monthly users, or 15 million users online at once, etc. It just means total accounts ever created since the game launched. 

Active monthly users are probably closer to like 200k unique humans, and daily players are probably more like 10-20k unique human beings. At peek hours, it's probably like 10k unique humans logged in at the same time, probably half that for off hours. These are guestimates based on other MMO's, and my experience playing MMO's since the early 2000's. 

The truth is though, it's hard to determine exact daily logins because a lot of game companies stopped publishing those numbers, which means any site that claims they have those numbers, is most likely lying. I mean 15 million players aren't logging in everyday, no MMORPG has 15 million unique logins per day.

[jokke.6239]

7 minutes ago, Gravitron.7982 said:

Yup, WoW did the same, ESO does the same, EQ1 did the same I believe. It's a common marketing strategy used to portray the entire game as a giant player base, so the customer thinks "Wow 15 milion people are playing this? Now I gotta play it!". But it does not mean 15 million monthly users, or 15 million users online at once, etc. It just means total accounts ever created since the game launched. 

Active monthly users are probably closer to like 200k unique humans, and daily players are probably more like 10-20k unique human beings. At peek hours, it's probably like 10k unique humans logged in at the same time, probably half that for off hours. These are guestimates based on other MMO's, and my experience playing MMO's since the early 2000's. 

The truth is though, it's hard to determine exact daily logins because a lot of game companies stopped publishing those numbers, which means any site that claims they have those numbers, is most likely lying. I mean 15 million players aren't logging in everyday, no MMORPG has 15 million unique logins per day.

Based on the activity in game I think it's far more than 10k online at the same time (and both EU and US existing)

I'd guess 20-60k like I said earlier

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

6 hours ago, Zok.4956 said:

Believe what you want. But knowing the difference between facts and beliefs/opinions has nothing to do with semantics.

The fact is: Only Anet knows the actual number of players, everyone else who pretends to know the numbers is just guessing.

Steam Service has play data...you could do a calculation if you knew the percentage of steam users to the percentage of the population to figure out the total active population on any given day.

For Steam client, there's on average, 4000-ish players playing, at each hour of the day, which is a generous 96,000 players each day coming from Steam. Obviously this number is a range (could be anywhere from 4000-96,000) because some players play more than just one hour. You can still give reasonable estimates and approximation for average play time...for instance a number that sits in the middle of the range, or where you assume a pareto distribution of players that play for longer...so for example...if 4000 people are playing for 1 hour, then a pareto distribution implies that 20% of those people (800 of them) are playing for 2 hours...then 20% of those people are playing for 4 hours (160) and 20% of those people are playing for 8 hours (32) and so on...which narrows down the range to a more realistic 23,961 - 48,000 players each day, which would be 718,830 - 1,440,000 "play sessions" per month from steam alone.

if you compare number of copies sold on steam (328,000) to the number of total copies sold in it's history (11 million), then you can assume that steam accounts at least fall within a 1 - 10% of it's total population (you infer that human behavior is consistent between players that bought the same game on steam, behaving the same way as players that did not), then with dimensional analysis would make any figure between 7 million and 14 million play sessions a month a reasonable estimate, and that includes overlapping players that play for more than one hour sessions.

Edited August 22, 2023 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

15 hours ago, Arnox.5128 said:

https://activeplayer.io/guild-wars-2/

Yep. 15 million plus monthly players. Very super dead, guys.

There is a difference between dead things, and undead things.

I would imagine that it would proper to say that GW2 was an undead game.

[Danikat.8537]

The nearest I've seen to an accurate guess is when a game is released on Steam, and shares how many copies were sold on Steam (which is not normally visible) someone finds the total number of copies sold and scales the Steam activity data up, assuming it's the same for the whole playerbase.

That has it's own problems though because there might be a lot of complicating factors, for example for a long time Elder Scrolls Online had problems if you played it through Steam so some people who bought it that way found alternative ways to access the game - they were still playing but counted as inactive Steam players which made the player count look lower than it was.

There's never been a conclusive way to count. Subscription games would count the number of active subscriptions (because that was the important number for them - how many people were paying them that month) but there was no guarantee everyone currently subscribing was logging in every day, or even every month, and later on when other options became available it missed people who played without a subscription. Anet has previously said they count active players as anyone who logs in to a character that day/week/month, but that includes alt accounts who don't do anything more than pick up the login reward and leave. But getting any more precise than that probably requires data that's harder to get and compare and some subjective decisions - how long does someone need to be logged in before you can say they're doing more than just collecting the reward? Which activities count as 'actively playing'? etc.

I suspect that's part of why most (all?) MMOs stopped reporting the numbers publicly. Internally they can use whatever metrics are important to them, with whatever disclaimers about the limitations they need, but trying to share that data publicly is more trouble than it's worth.

[Knighthonor.4061]

Is Maintenance mode really all that of a bad thing in MMO industry?

[Gravitron.7982]

1 minute ago, Knighthonor.4061 said:

Is Maintenance mode really all that of a bad thing in MMO industry?

It's probably not in the long run, I mean look at EQ1, DAoC, the SWG emulators (if you count those), they are still active and have people playing it. I guess enough people to keep the lights on and remain profitable. SWTOR is about to go into maintenance mode, so we will see how that goes. I imagine GW2 being in maintenance mode, people who love the game will still play it. 

[Danikat.8537]

1 minute ago, Knighthonor.4061 said:

Is Maintenance mode really all that of a bad thing in MMO industry?

Depends on whether you mean 'maintenance mode' in the sense of "none of the recent updates interest me" or actual maintenance mode like GW1 has been in since at least when GW2 launched - where it's still online but only gets the bare minimum of updates required to keep it online (and one random patch with some minor graphical improvements).

The first is a non-issue, it's people either being dramatic or attempting to use a technical term and getting it wrong. The second can be a problem in that it means there's nothing new coming so existing players will eventually run out of things to do and stop playing and so the population is likely to go down over time, potentially ending up in a situation where existing players can't complete things because there aren't enough people. How quickly that happens and how much of a problem it is depends on the game.

[Mewone.3247]

Still takes half an hour to find a hfb kite for ko cm 20kp+

Edited August 22, 2023 by Mewone.3247