[FuriousDaDruid]

I got a total of 1098 people online from doing the /who all count command and the /who all 50 etc.. on theTargonor server at 10 pm EST

results as follows:

1-5 65
6-10 145
11-15 161
16-20 165
21-25 196
26-30 149

and I got 242 people total from doing the /who all 50, /who all 49 etc.. way earlier for levels 30+

adding 242 plus 881 then subtracting the 25 people that were double counted at level 30 results in a grand total of 1098 people online during a Thursday night on theTargonor server.

I just learned about the /who all count command earlier tonight and will be using that for all my future population counts.

[niack]

"Only SOE and Sigil have hard numbers"

And even those numbers will not be al ltaht accurate because several of them are from Station accounts that would not be here if not for part of the package...Maybe you can get more accurate info if you factor in how many Stations accoutns there were before VG and subtract that from the number of accounts they have now.....Im nto buying that this game is all that healthy...The server numbers are too low for a game this new.....

[taz]

Originally Posted by FuriousDaDruid

I got a total of 1098 people online from doing the /who all count command and the /who all 50 etc.. on theTargonor server at 10 pm EST

results as follows:

1-5 65
6-10 145
11-15 161
16-20 165
21-25 196
26-30 149

and I got 242 people total from doing the /who all 50, /who all 49 etc.. way earlier for levels 30+

adding 242 plus 881 then subtracting the 25 people that were double counted at level 30 results in a grand total of 1098 people online during a Thursday night on theTargonor server.

I just learned about the /who all count command earlier tonight and will be using that for all my future population counts.

I dont know if you are "championing" this game or if you are bashing it...or just giving some #'s.

Those numbers are nothing to be proud of ...at all. I mean 1000 people logged on all at once...umm I'm underwhelmed.. considering those servers were meant to be support 5k players and probably average around 2500.

Assuming 1k people were logged into all servers thats a grand whopping total of 13k.. And I mean assuming....most likely that would be a high #. In otherwords about 2.5 servers worth of max population. Maybe 5 servers if you had medium load (2500).

[Meritt]

Originally Posted by hanzo

Brad pulled that number out of an orafice. The gammers I know in real life and from guildies I know in other games, it's more like 50 to 75% of subscribers get on during peak hours.

Haha. Man, no, I'm sorry, that's just wrong. I'll see if I can dig up some other citations to reflect that number.

There is absolutely no way a percentage of active subscribers get on at peak. There is the simple fact that people alone have very different schedules. An average gaming session is around ~3 hours so that's a pretty small window in which to find 75% of all subscribers.

[Abelian75]

Originally Posted by hanzo

Brad pulled that number out of an orafice. The gammers I know in real life and from guildies I know in other games, it's more like 50 to 75% of subscribers get on during peak hours.

Dude, no WAY. Just think about that for a second, seriously... So only one out of 4 people that subscribe to the game are not on? That would be... unbelievable.

I imagine 25% isn't just the typical peak, it's the typical RECORD peak (perhaps discounting launch day and such).

Bear in mind that WoW's record peak is closer to 10% (but as I posted before, the fact that they are global will naturally reduce the peak percentage).

[Meritt]

Originally Posted by hanzo

If the average player plays 10 to 12 hours a week and plays 4 to 5 days a week, it's easy to see that during peak hours 50 to 75% of active players are online.

You sir should work in marketing. You are so good at fabricating numbers that you believe them yourself

[Lanceli]

Originally Posted by sjb1

yeah i know. and imo its a bad trend. but that's just my opinion

what's going to be interesting is seeing the trend line over the next 3-6 months as other MMO's enter/leave the market. And thats one reason I like Meritts collection system; if it's fairly automatted then it's likely he will keep doing it for some time.

whilst logging in at counts at certain times is also useful, it's a manual process that I bet people will stop doing as they get bored etc

edit: oh and the log in and count users is important though. it helps to validate the data being pulled out of vgplayers. just as a long term data gathering method it's too manual, and thus more likely to fail. plus of course all it does if gives counts. I bet you Merritt can give answers to these:

1. % of each class archtype between 1 - 15, 16 - 30, 30+
2. what percentage of characters have adventuring and crafting > level 30

etc etc.

I am really looking forward to the site going live and hopefully letting me delve into the numbers. just for fun

Dont think there is a way to do a /who and see who is a crafter above level 10. Like /who Blacksmith works (Tier one or as high as 10) but /who Armorsmith doesnt nor does /who Swordsmith and same result for the other two crafting families.

I guess they dont want people to knwo who is the highest level crafter and spam the guy all day with tells cause he'd probobly quit and they'd loose a subscriber.. lol.

I think you can see crafter level from station website though just not in game.

[Ariste]

Originally Posted by hanzo

If the average player plays 10 to 12 hours a week and plays 4 to 5 days a week, it's easy to see that during peak hours 50 to 75% of active players are online.

Sorry man, but not even close. As someone else said before, that means that for every 4 players that play Vanguard, you're saying that three of them are on during peak hours? Only one fourth of the player base is offline during peak hours? C'mon.

Peak hour percentages don't even approach 75%. I couldn't give you an accurate number, but I know it's nowhere near 75%.

[gimpusmons]

The record for WOW's concurrent users, meaning how many are logged in and playing at one time is a little over 600,000 in Nov or Dec of 2006 as I recall. The average is closer to 350,000. What I don't know is if these numbers included China's 5 million players. Let's say it doesn't and let's stick to the average. That would mean of the remaining 3.5 million players about 10% actually log in concurrently as Abelian75 suggested.

I'm willing to bet that VG's concurrent user level is also somewhere near 10%. Because even if this is a new game and some people are playing more consistently than usual, others are playing less due to continual problems with performance, bugs, grouping, and general dissatisfaction as expressed to infinity on these forums.

If people are recording server pop averages during peak hours at around 13,000 to 15,000 players that would suggest subs are around 140,000 right now. My guess is that Brad's past quote of 150,000 plus subs has leveled off and is either already heading for decline or will soon. That is, unless confidence is restored to the remaining players who are beginning to question the game's direction and Sigil's ability to address VG's problems in a more timely and professional manner.

[Atoyota]

The numbers that they have playing currently are'nt the issue for me.
How many accounts have been sold, or how many have access is also meaningless to me...

What is interesting is how many were playing to how many are playing, and may continue to play. Factoring in those that just get on line, come back for another look, etctra....

So it's a wider focus with Tme as an element that tracks the trend in population, either positive or negative. Factoring in new and returning subscriptions, still shows a negative at this point.

New subscribers should outnumber returns by far as well, but returns will eventually come much closer to a positive effect on the overall trend as the game ages, while new subscribers decline.

If the game improves dramatically, then yeah new subscriptions could also increase, but so would returns (viral marketing). This may never happen and would be the extraordinary event I feel is highly unlikely.

Losing customers for whatever reasons usually means they are gone forever...

[Testplayer]

He's welcome to make a buck.

Doesn't look to hard to get an actual pop count, as per Foz's post.

But he can't, he quit.

So continue to data mine, someone else's work.

[Atoyota]

One item to consider with this type of data and not sure how well it's been factored in.

When considering level changes in characters and spheres, you also have to think about the leveling curve and weight it accordingly.

Physical counts per server by a series of /who's is ok, but using meritts method of measuring activity made me wonder if he has that accounted for.

Probably... just was'nt sure.

[Josephene]

Originally Posted by Meritt

One thing to note about that trend is this:

I base activity upon level gain. As time progresses, the number of days per level gain for a given character increases. Therefore a player who plays every day but only gains a level every 3rd day, his activity only shows up on that 3rd day.

Yes this is still an overall poor trend because we should have new numbers from new players. Overall population is still growing, although the trendline is upward it's slope is nowhere near that of the activity decline slope.

If more new people were coming to vanguard these numbers would be greatly affected. What i mean is, at lower levels as you said people gain more levels faster, thus occupy more of the "activity curve". So, if the population of new players was increasing by a fair amount these numbers would skew high.

Given a "leveling activity" as a bar, i would expect new players coming to vanguard would greatly change the result of the graph, in a positive direction, the fact that it does not, seems to me that the population is stagnant-ish or shrinking not growing.

-Allegria

[Atoyota]

Originally Posted by Josephene

If more new people were coming to vanguard these numbers would be greatly affected. What i mean is, at lower levels as you said people gain more levels faster, thus occupy more of the "activity curve". So, if the population of new players was increasing by a fair amount these numbers would skew high.

Given a "leveling activity" as a bar, i would expect new players coming to vanguard would greatly change the result of the graph, in a positive direction, the fact that it does not, seems to me that the population is stagnant-ish or shrinking not growing.

-Allegria

when I looked at his graph I took the level curve into consideration, as well as new pops. The two I feel balance out at least considering the age of the game. I was bringing this up for refining the data as the game ages. Then you won't have a newer population but more alts with more high level characters inactive. You should still have newb's but not as many.

It's tricky, a lot to think about...

[Meritt]

Originally Posted by Atoyota

One item to consider with this type of data and not sure how well it's been factored in.

When considering level changes in characters and spheres, you also have to think about the leveling curve and weight it accordingly.

Physical counts per server by a series of /who's is ok, but using meritts method of measuring activity made me wonder if he has that accounted for.

Probably... just was'nt sure.

No, I did not weight it accordingly. I would need to know the weights to apply to each and I really don't know how I would go about determining that. I mean I guess you could say something along the lines of:

Level 1-15 player gaining level every day is equivalent to a level 40-50 player gaining a level every 4 days?

That is what you are getting at?

[Atoyota]

Originally Posted by Meritt

No, I did not weight it accordingly. I would need to know the weights to apply to each and I really don't know how I would go about determining that. I mean I guess you could say something along the lines of:

Level 1-15 player gaining level every day is equivalent to a level 40-50 player gaining a level every 4 days?

That is what you are getting at?

yes, avg activity ratio assumed...

Meaning a level 1 can gain 6 levels in a day, level 10 3L, 20 1 or less, and 30, 1 per week, 40 1 per month... All this is just guesswork.

Then you are also assuming 100% activity or checking for that in other spheres. Like I said a lot more difficult and a lot more to think about how you could track active character populations.

What you came up with so far is very interesting, but I think when the server ages the only way is a physical /who count if that's even possible.

[carmineluper]

Originally Posted by Blitzburg

Well, I guess I just disagree about why people are leaving the game. IMO, the major problem is performance - followed closely by serious bugs. I'm not talking about the occasional graphic glitch or quest not completable (although those are annoying). I'm talking about CTDs happening with regularity, the disorienting chunk lines, and bugs that make grouping difficult. Those game-breaking bugs just kill the experience for many.

Some might not like the mechanics of the game and leave anyways. But if the game was stable and had at least half decent graphics on average machines, I think it would have gotten far better reviews, had far more subscriptions, and retained far more players - even if the hook isn't there.

Actually, the reason I have stopped playing the game so much is not because of bugs. Its simply because of repeating factiors in most characters. The game is good, but its not great. The graphics are good, but not next generation. The fighting if good, but not next generation.

Simply put this game is still a bunch of button smashing, kiting, and imo, poor spell/skill graphics. Not only this but there are a bunch of heal 1-2-3-4-5-6 skills in the game. Granting a level 50 character not really that many options. For the few classes the game has, I would think they would be able to imagine new spells/skills for every class, granting each class over 50 different possibilities, than renaming things with a 2 or 3 behind it.

Yes I realize some of you will say dang! 50 spells is too many. But in reality if you make them situational, they arn't. If you include differenc outnerspells, spells off of crits, buff spells, and that sort of thing.... 50 really isn't that many at all.

The world in Vanguard is good, however fairly repetative for quite some time. Dungeons just don't seem very cool right now. I have played a character in beta up to 45, and 2 level 30 chars in the Live game, and traveled quite a bit..... nothing really strikes me as new and exciting yet.

So basically I am just kinda playing every now and then, untill the game is finished with alot of the things it is still lacking.

[tdewey10]

Originally Posted by carmineluper

The world in Vanguard is good, however fairly repetative for quite some time. Dungeons just don't seem very cool right now. I have played a character in beta up to 45, and 2 level 30 chars in the Live game, and traveled quite a bit..... nothing really strikes me as new and exciting yet.

You played a character in beta to 45? When was this? You realize that the limit was 40 in beta 3, 4 & 5. What level 30 chars on which server? And what dungeons "don't seem very cool right now"? VG has an amazing variety of dungeons.

Give me some specifics as to which dungeons you've ah "traveled" too that "don't seem very cool right now".

Otherwise I'm declaring Shenanigans on this post.