The MMO Numbers Game

Terra Nova has an interesting discussion going, talking about what really matters when we talk about a virtual world's population. Total registered accounts? Accounts logged in since last month? Concurrent users? Interesting stuff. From the article: "In a similar vein we discussed Second Life's 100K+ members, a figure which I and others have questioned here on TN. Cory Ondrejka said that SL's 'concurrency numbers are rapidly approaching 4500, about 17,000 residents were in SL in the last 24 hours, and 50,000 in the last 30 days... If you go back even 90 days you get about 90% of the accounts having logged in.'"

Comments

One often overlooked problem

[SmallFurryCreature]

Is that current MMORPG games split their userbase. The more complex the game becomes, think Star Wars Galaxies, the more room their is for extremely specialised characters the more chance you have that your on the wrong server.

You could easily find yourselve on a server with no Image Designers for instance. It always seem that the most imaginative players who organized all the fun things were on servers that I was not on.

The reason for splitting the userbase over different servers is off course obvious if you ever played SWG, everyone centered on one city and that meant that the central hub could become unplayable.

Of course SWG was never supposed to have a hub, just that some bad design decissions and an unwillingness to update the game meant that coronet became the unofficial hub. Now that the NGE has happened coronet is in fact pretty much deserted. What I am complaining about them not updating and then I complain about the update? Well all I would have wanted is for them to make sharnaffs hit with disease to reflect them being overhunted. Disease was bitch and critters that had it were extremely unpopular to hunt. It could have helped spread people out across the universe. Simply make any overhunted critter go diseased and voila, the end of everyone hunting the same. NGE cured that but in the same way decapitation will cure a headache.

Anyway back to the problem of splitting the userbase up among servers. It means you could easily find yourselve on server with a total population of perhaps 10.000. Substract the people who already given up or for whom the character is an alt while they are playing most of the time on another server and you soon realize that the real population on a server is at best a few thousand.

Guild Wars does something similar and like WoW splits the users among continents but does allow you to vist an international hub where everyone from all the continents can meet (usually a pretty empty place). WoW of course does not allow european users to play with american users. Neither does it give european customers a free trial but europeans are used to being screwed.

But the small populations are not just a distortion, they make the games far more vulnerable when a group decides to leave. It can easily mean that a small guild leaving suddenly pulls the rug out under the player run economy. On the SWG I played there was one crafter player who made good stuff for an good price. She (not sure if she was a real female but I always judge people by their avatar unless their behaviour is a complete mismatch) was also easy to sell to offering an okay price with no hassle and not always demanding you rattle of every stat.

For many of us she was the supplier of food buffs and later also armour. Then she left and I was for the first time forced to start looking for my essential supplies. God what a mess that was. Still is.

Same with other proffesions, we had 1 image designer. If he was on holiday or something that service was removed.

If SWG had been one big universe with the game enforcing users to spread out across the planets I think it would have been a far greater success. To many new players on free trials choose the recommended least loaded server and found themselves in ghost towns.

An MMO is hardly massive when you got a max of a few hundred people online at the same time.

The revenue per player may be intresting for your bank, it is the number of people online with you that matters to users. WoW showed us that people who believed the market had topped out were very very wrong. Now remains to be seen wether WoW itself has topped out the market or that another MMORPG game with a different approach might rival its success or even leave it behind.

I still think there is room for a complex deep MMORPG that SWG tried to be. It will be extremely difficult but the simple fact is that people are still hanging on to the complex MMO's even with the lure of WoW. Successfull as WoW is it is not everybody's cup of thee. To much fixatio