It has been an extremely long week for the Aggronaut. I’ve been battling some medical issues, so today I am bringing you a wrap up post through the eyes of someone in pain. Honestly I didn’t play as much Rift as I would have liked to this week. When I am in pain I don’t really feel like I can be a responsible member of a guild and server community, so instead I just avoid interaction with people. This has lead to a good deal more Minecraft than normal.
The End is Nigh
The other day I was out on the Wal-mart website, and like a sirens call there was a link saying that Diablo III was available for preorder. It isn’t like I would actually preorder anything through Wal-mart, but the link was shiny and reddish and begged to be pushed (not to virus authors, hide your payloads behind red shiny buttons). I mostly followed the link to look at the pretty screenshots but once I arrived I saw something interesting.
Now if you go out to GameStop or amazon and look up the Diablo III page you just get some generic preorder information but no estimated delivery date. However if you look in the above image (and I took the liberty of zooming in for you) Wal-mart lists an estimated delivery date for the game. Do they know something that the other companies don’t?
Honestly, chances are they do. Wal-mart is known for their heavy handed practices at least in the music industry, so it is not a large stretch of the imagination that they would have the same kind of sway over the video game industry since they represent the single largest game seller. I cannot see Wal-mart posting a date they have no background intel surrounding.
I am not immune to the irony that I am posting Diablo news when I have dedicated so much time lately to talking about the failings of Blizzard. Thing is… this is Diablo, it is not like I won’t be playing it. I ‘ve spent countless sleepless nights playing the first two, and if this one is half as good as those were it will be well worth the potentially brief ride. You can take the info with a grain of salt, but just thought I would point out the date. Would make a good deal of sense, considering that would mean a d3 launch just prior to Blizzcon.
Scary Numbers
Keeping with the tinfoil hat theme, I had read a couple of posts recently talking about the declining player base as represented on the WoW Census website. So it got my curious about what numbers the realm I played on, Argent Dawn might show. I can remember during the launch of Cataclysm, I went out to the website to see what kind of effect the normal post expansion bump did on our server population. For Argent Dawn, it listed that we had roughly 20,000 active players.
This morning when I pulled up the same stats, it was registering only slightly more than 8,000 players for Argent Dawn. The question is, what exactly does this represent. Was there a massive drop off in the usage of the WoW Census add-on? Did Argent Dawn really lose over half its player base since the launch of Cataclysm? I honestly don’t have the answers, and am puzzled by the results.
If you look at the wider picture, WoW Census lists the total combined US and Euro player population at 4.5 million. Now I don’t know what this looked like several months ago, but we have long heard the touted 12 million players figure spread around. From what I had heard as far as a breakout, that represented 8 million US and Euro players and 4 million in the growing Asian markets. So if you take that into account as the numbers, the figures from WoW Census would show a drop in players by nearly a half.
Problem is, I have no way of knowing how accurate the WoW Census data is. Publishers have been reluctant to give out any real player numbers. The last one I can remember showing how many players were logged into a server was Dark Age of Camelot. WoW census gets its data from voluntary submissions through their custom add-on. So what is uncertain is if we are seeing a true drop in subscribers, or just a drop in usage of the add-on.
All I can really base things on is my own incidental data from the Argent Dawn server community. I know the guild I once lead has dropped on WoW Census from the 5th largest guild on the server to roughly the 12th. These kind of numbers test out at least incidentally in my head, as we have had a large number of players quit for various reasons. I myself left to go play Rift as did several others, however there is an even larger number of players who are quitting simply because they are tired of the MMO genre.
All of this taken into account, are the recent changes like Call to Arms, and the cosmetic changes to the Warlock pets simply meant as a way to bribe players to stick around? Once upon a time I used to play this game called Horizons. It offered the ability to play a Dragon, something no other game has done to this date. As they began to hemorrhage subscribers, they started adding in additional content for the dragon players, knowing they were the ones who couldn’t get a similar experience anywhere else.
2 years down the line, all that was literally left playing the game were the players who for one reason or another just wanted to play dragons. So I guess my curiosity is, are we starting to see GMs putting in content for the sole purpose of trying to glue players to the game? Like I said, I don’t really have any answers but it is food for thought nonetheless.
The Rifts are Closing
There is a well thought post over on Ardwulf’s Lair entitled “Rift on a Downward Spiral?”. If you haven’t managed to read it yet you certainly should. Basically there has been a lot of back and forth amongst the bloggers making significance that there has been a 20% drop in gameplay hours for Rift on the gaming communication Client Xfire. To Quote Ardwulf…
To me, a 20% dropoff (not after 4 weeks but 6, mind,) along with reports of persistent server queues even to this day, seems spectacularly good. After two weeks of Warhammer Online you could feel players flowing out of the game. Remember, you can stop playing before your sub runs out, and many did just that, myself included. A loss of 20% (measured in playtime,) implies very strong ongoing performance in terms of retaining players who are actually active.
I personally have played many games in the past that were losing players faster than you could count. I played Warhammer for about 6 months after release and Age of Conan for a month and a half. In both cases, after the free month was over the servers felt noticeably lighter for the lack of players. Rift most definitely does not feel like a dying game, at least not over on the Shadefallen server.
Another good take on the numbers is at Lowered Expectations, which presents some other data.
Really, is a 20% decline from a single gaming service like X-Fire indicative of the overall market share? The fact it is just one piece of the pie tells me no. Look at the Raptr numbers, which show a less than 10% loss. Look at the shard listings and see how a majority of servers are still at high…and even some queues.
Decline will really not be noted until we see merges or closure of servers.
I however present a completely different picture. The main issue I see with judging the performance of a game based on a third party communication client is this. These services are not nearly as popular as the regular users seem to believe they are. I’ve used both at various times throughout my gaming career, and ultimately I get bored with them and simply quit logging in. Currently I use Raptr as a chat client, but I have long ago turned off its ability to track my gameplay habbits.
On top of this, on Raptr I have less than a half dozen friends that use the service. The greatest majority of my friends use Steam, and in reality even if you purchased your game through steam like I did, there is no solid reason why you should actually launch the game that way. Ultimately I think the Xfire and Raptr communities represent a niche of gamers. Quite possibly the game simply doesn’t appeal as widely to that niche as it does others.
What I am seeing on my own server is a decrease of the wow tourists. I know them well, I was one for years myself. A wow tourist is a player who goes out, plays a new game for the free month to get a break, then ultimately returns back to their core game feeling validated in their decision. I was a tourist in every major MMO release since WoW shipped in 2004, I played my free month, maybe a month extra but ultimately I returned back to the mothership.
Who I am seeing glued to Rift are an older demographic, the players who remain nostalgic about Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and ultimately the good points of Warhammer online and miss those games as truly viable platforms. It is less likely for me to be able to explain a boss fight in “its like this wow boss” terms, but more likely to be able to say “Iron Tomb feels so much like Muire Tomb” and get a response.
I know it is probably a bit hypocritical to dismiss claims that Rift is dying, in the same post I present numbers that show a decline in WoW subscribers, but to me you have to consider the two sources. With WoW census you have a tool that takes a broad survey of players who are not even running the add-on, trying to come up with base numbers of who is available on the server at a given time. With these guesstimates, you are looking at a third party tool that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual gameplay.
All that said, I have seen a decline in the player base in Rift. However this is a good thing. We have managed to shed a lot of the “barrens chat” types, and kept the seasoned mmo veterans who are willing to work for their rewards. I have seen the high end public channels continue to grow and get more helpful with time. So in the grand scheme of things, I think this decline will ultimately be good for the various budding communities.
A Safe Haven
With the recent pain I have been in, I have like I said been shunning anything that would involve someone else relying on me. As a result I have logged in for a bit, completely my event dailies and usually logged shortly thereafter. The rest of my time has been spent over on the Stalwart Minecraft server. Every so often I get an idea in my head that just has to be built, so my city of Belgarde has been expanded in bursts of creativity.
The most recent burst of effort has involved the left side of the image above. Previously I had this open area, where a good number of monsters spawned each night. The dock area that I had built up was unfortunately a part of this overall area. So one of my goals for some time has been to find a way to both secure the docks and increase the protected space of Belgarde.
In a city like the one I have been building, not much actual food production could happen inside the protected walls. Ultimately each city is ringed with a network of agriculture areas, that feed resources back into the walled area. In a game like Minecraft, where any undeveloped land is sure to spawn monsters, simply dotting the countryside around Belgarde with farms really didn’t fit the bill.
As a result I decided to extend out the walls to loosely encompass an area of land that would ultimately be built up as farms. So far I have managed to complete the wall, and a guard station. In addition to this I torched off the entire area to immediately stop the monster spawns while working on developing it.
I cleared and terraced an area in the upper right-hand region of the new walled zone. This has become the first farm in the area, and includes a large house, work shed, and a large fenced off field of crops. I don’t want to create cookie cutter homesteads, so this will take some time to design and build each structure to feel cohesive but look somewhat unique at the same time. I will post additional shots as I get more things built. Right now the general region just looks unfinished.
Wrapping the Wrap-up Post
So that’s all the assorted bits and pieces that didn’t really seem to fit elsewhere thematically. I finally managed to pull the trigger and order the new laptop, so next week sometime I should be blogging from it. I have a number of topics swimming around in my head that should make for at least interesting posts next week. Given my irregular posting habits in the past, I am still shocked that I have managed to maintain a month of posting something each day. While it might not seem like much for the bloggers who have been hard at it for three years or so, but for me just being consistent for a month is a proud moment.
