What is the general consensus on server emptyness?

I can check again right now and update. I DID see Justice go into the solid grey while I was doing this. Updates in place. Change does not appear to be in any way substantial.

Like I said, I'd be impressed if it hit 7500. I can't give you anything but an arbitrary number to use with regard to hidden players. 50% seems extremely generous though, but who knows. That would suggest a lot of anti-social people.

IMO people using hide eliminate themselves from the process. They are useless to anyone searching for a team and they are useless to anyone hoping for a random invite. They take themselves out of any population assessment by not participating in the population.

Short of seeing them standing at the market they may as well not exist from a player perspective.

It's like if you asked me to sit on a road and count the cars that went by to determine if we should install a toll booth. At the end of the day I give you the results and then someone says 'what about that road over there?"

My disagreement comes from the fact that we are looking at two different issues:

You're looking at the "how does a player view the population" issue and I'm looking at the "what IS the population and what does that mean" issue.

I have read many stories of new folks showing up and thinking things are dead. Those stories, while kind of a bummer, are irrelevant to me. My only concern is whether there is enough of a playing population to rationalize the continued existence of the servers. So far, the numbers I see don't seem to correlate whatsoever with the amount of money being dumped into the development of the game, so I'm obviously missing something.

I'm trying to determine what that something is through hard data rather than opinions.

Even at 70000 subs, and 56% of the playing population hiding from searches, you're talking about 10500 people playing. Why would 85% of the paying population pay for a game they don't play?

I can take a stab at that -

I go through phases in playing this game. There have been a few months where I'm on perhaps a total of 4-5 hours - not per day, for the whole month.

So for the purposes of seeing people in-game, I'm not there. I am there for the purposes of your concern, however, BillZ, because I am paying my $15 to NCSoft by keeping my subscription active.

Why do I continue to pay a sub for a game I might not play very much if at all in any given mont? Frankly, the subscription fee is pretty minimal (even back when I was unemployed) in the overall scheme of household expenses. I cut out movies and going out, but kept the subscription because as we have had people point out numerous times - even if I only play those 4 - 5 hours, I have gotten my money's worth out of the game in comparison to the costs of alternate forms of entertainment.

Plus I can't be bothered to go into my account to shut off billing, since there's always the chance that I may decide to spend an evening playing.

And I still get to post here.

Fifteen dollars gets me access to occasional entertainment should the mood strike me, in-game, and certainly here in the forums.


Another change to my situation is that now that I am back to work, I spend less time in-game. Typically, I may be on an hour or so on a weekday evening or a Satuday/Sunday afternoon. Highly unlikely that I would run into many Oceanic players at those times as their playtimes run about opposite mine - so our subscriptions (mine vs. the Oceanic player's) will not be concurrent online. Even gamers have to sleep sometimes. I think you may be adding in a factor to take this into consideration, but I'm not sure.

But it would still be a WAG. It's entirely "possible" that I could do the same snapshot every hour on the hour and it could be an entirely different crop of people every hour that just happens to only play for an hour and log off.

Such an idea fails, though, when I log in and see the same names logged in whenever I check my global channel.

However, I fully accept that there are people that only play at certain times. And that fact does make this kind of analysis pretty much worthless for no other reason but that I don't know who of the 5000 I saw logged in tonight were logged in 5 hours ago, nor do I know who was logged in 5 hours ago that weren't when I checked.

So I see the point that only active subscription numbers matter for the information I desire.

One additional point that seems obvious but that I haven't seen explicitly stated yet is the fact that some players hold multiple subscriptions - this would certainly account for some of the people who are "paying for a game they don't play". They're playing on their other account. Of course, they might log on both in order to PL, fill, whatever, but it's likely that at least a small percentage of active subscriptions are second/third/etc accounts and therefore from, say, four accounts you get one player online.

Now, obviously this isn't the norm especially for newer players and many veteran players especially now that we can purchase character slots have only a single account - but it's a factor that should probably be considered.

I'd also be interested to know if anyone really knows what a 'critical mass' would be for an MMO. Bill, you've mentioned several times that you don't know if the numbers you are seeing are low, but they seem low to you and this concerns you. While this makes sense, if the goal here is an empirical, factual assessment, then soem kind of objective benchmark is needed or whatever data is gained cannot be meaningfullly interpreted.

How exactly we'd go about getting such a benchmark number outside of direct Dev statements, I don't know.

The other topic of this thread, subjective perception of population, seems (at least to me) to be sufficient based on my ability to play the game the way I wish to play and to recruit up teams when I wish to do so without undue difficulty or time investment. I have knowledge and savvy that a neophyte lacks and I've gone into that issue upthread, but speaking strictly about population, it is my anecdotal assessment that the current population levels are adequate and often more than adequate. I wouldn't say excellent, but neither would I say troubling.

Ultimately, however, the only measure that matters is the one the Devs are using. I see that and on that level I am concerned that if the game's numbers do not match up to whatever internal benchmark the Devs are using, consequences are in store for us as players. Unfortunately, I'm not confident that we can make any meaningful conclusions without access to that insider information. The best we could do is compile really good data and hope a redname gives some kind of cryptic yea or nay to it.

Last year, I bought a one month Sony Station Pass which allows access to all the Sony MMO's on a single payment. I was tired of City of Heroes at the time, thought I might play around with my abandoned Everquest 1 & 2 accounts. (Didn't work out by the way. Wasn't fun for me.)

When I did that, it occurred to me that I also had access to my old Everquest Online Adventures account. For those that know about this, it is an MMO designed to play on of a Playstation 2, using the DVD and memory cards, no hard drive required.

To my surprise, EQOA was still alive, though only barely. They still had at least one developer, since there was a patch note from a month before detailing bug fixes for a plane raid. As far as I could tell, server population was 1 or 2, counting myself and occasionally one other player that I could find. They still had all their original servers, 6 I think.

I bring up this anecdote simply to note that it can't cost too much to keep a server alive and running on an MMO. Developer salary costs are probably a much bigger problem. Even a small population server in CoH probably pays for itself as far as server costs are concerned.

In that same phase last summer, I also reactivated my Anarchy Online account for a few days. AO has only ever had 3 servers, 2 english language and one german language. All were still there. Reading on the forums for AO, I found server merger threads nearly identical to the server merger threads on CoH.

I may be making an unwarranted conclusion from these things, but my guess is that MMO's, like the original Everquest, which merge servers are probably doing so to consolidate populations, rather than to save on maintenance and electricity costs. They may have done it to avoid future expenses of replacing aging servers. No way of knowing really, it's all speculation.

I expect that CoH is still profitable, even with a smaller subscription base. They don't seem to be cutting back on staff.

Well thanks to Bill for making the effort. He kinda went above and beyond for this, no matter how 'admissible' the data is.

I find it rather frustrating that they don't release population numbers to the public anymore. But there really isn't much we can do about that.

My major concern in this thread has been two things:

1) The new player perception of our game's population.

2) How that might be affecting people who might otherwise be interested in trying the game.

The overall worry I have is that if GR doesn't perform up to the expectations of the NCSoft management(not talking about our Dev team), will we ever get another expansion on the order of magnitude of GR again?

I don't want to see this game hit another holding pattern with 15 devs max working on it. If GR doesn't give the kind of return that NCSoft is expecting having put all those resources into its development, will we be looking at another 4 years with no major expansion and small updates which can't sustain interest in the long run?

So my worry isn't that the game will die anytime soon, but that it might run the risk of not continuing to grow at a decent rate. But maybe I'm needlessly worrying and GR has sold enough on pre-orders alone to pay for itself.

If you go back to the older NCsoft reports, when max concurrent and sub numbers were still present.

The max concurrent typically fell between 11 and 14% of the subs numbers.

Just after COV release someones (Either Cuppa or Statesman IIRC been a while) posted that they broke 200 000 subs, though it wasn't in the reported December values for that quarter.