What is the general consensus on server emptyness?
By
3dent,
Posted on: 2010-07-09 07:05 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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I Agree with your speculations. |
Originally Posted by Frosticus
My gut would suggest that forum goers are more likely to use hide, but I have absolutely no concrete evidence to support that, just speculations.
-we are more knowledgeable about the game and might be more inclined to solo -we know more of the global channels thus removing our need to be a part of the larger and less organized system -we have access to more organized events/teams and subgroups Whether any of that translates to any sort of statistically significant difference I have no idea |
My own speculation based off of your speculation: If we are more knowledgeable about the game, we are more likely to know about how the Hide system works, and thus more likely to use it.
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Honestly that's why i think making definite assertions about subscriber numbers one way or the other is a bit silly. It would take quite a bit more effort with the tools players have available to make a slightly accurate guess at what the active player and subscriber numbers are currently. At the very least i would say taking a headcount on each server every four hours or so for a week just to get a handle on the non-hidden numbers of active characters on the servers. Which still wouldn't tell us much about subscriber numbers.|
Originally Posted by Ironblade
Given that forum visitors are not representative of the average player, would anyone care to speculate whether this would skew the numbers up or down? Offhand, I can't think of any reasons why forumgoers would be more or less likely to be hidden.
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Of course there are people out there who not only know the number of active accounts, but even the exact percentages of players on hide, average number of hours logged in per account per week, etcetera, etcetera. However they work for Paragon Studios and NCsoft and aren't allowed to tell us.
So far the game is doing well enough that NCsoft thought investing in it is a good idea. Beyond that it's hard to say. i fully support any efforts Billz and others want to make at trying to nail down active player numbers in any event.
Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
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I counter by stating that anyone who wishes to be hidden would ask in broadcast and gain the knowledge to do so.
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Originally Posted by BBQ_Pork
I Agree with your speculations.
My own speculation based off of your speculation: If we are more knowledgeable about the game, we are more likely to know about how the Hide system works, and thus more likely to use it. |
Be well, people of CoH.
But to ask about hide would require knowing that yes, there ARE people who are not visible on /search or that there is a /hide feature.
Analogy, possibly a bad one: I wouldn't ask what those guys were doing behind my house if I didn't first know that there were guys behind my house.
But seriously? I have no idea what the numbers really are and I'm just making idle speculation. Feel free to ignore it.
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True enough. Assuming you knew the question was available to ask in the first place...
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
I counter by stating that anyone who wishes to be hidden would ask in broadcast and gain the knowledge to do so.
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I imagine if/when the time comes that he decides to make any definitive statements they will include reasonable variance.|
Originally Posted by Schismatrix
Honestly that's why i think making definite assertions about subscriber numbers one way or the other is a bit silly. It would take quite a bit more effort with the tools players have available to make a slightly accurate guess at what the active player and subscriber numbers are currently. At the very least i would say taking a headcount on each server every four hours or so for a week just to get a handle on the non-hidden numbers of active characters on the servers. Which still wouldn't tell us much about subscriber numbers.
Of course there are people out there who not only know the number of active accounts, but even the exact percentages of players on hide, average number of hours logged in per account per week, etcetera, etcetera. However they work for Paragon Studios and NCsoft and aren't allowed to tell us. So far the game is doing well enough that NCsoft thought investing in it is a good idea. Beyond that it's hard to say. i fully support any efforts Billz and others want to make at trying to nail down active player numbers in any event. |
I don't see him simply stating: ok exactly 23% of people use hide and exactly 9.6% of people are online during peak times. I'd much more expect a reasonable range.
The thing is that if the population numbers are low enough, even giving generous ranges for the values won't have a huge impact on the results.
Scenario: Player is playing and finds that he keeps getting invites he does not want.
Question: What does player do about it?
Probably response: "I wonder if there's some way I can stop these invites from happening."
Player action: "Hey, does anyone know if I can block invites?"
Another player answers: "Team tab, top pulldown, change to Not Accepting Invites."
Player response: "Oh, sweet, thanks!"
Player starts getting tells asking if he wants to join a team.
Player response: "Ok, that kind of worked, but I'm still being pelted with tells."
Another player responds: "Type in /hide and choose your poison."
Player: "Sweeeeet."
Be well, people of CoH.
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Of course, but that assumes a problem that requires a solution where no problem necessarily exists.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Scenario: Player is playing and finds that he keeps getting invites he does not want.
Question: What does player do about it? Probably response: "I wonder if there's some way I can stop these invites from happening." Player action: "Hey, does anyone know if I can block invites?" Another player answers: "Team tab, top pulldown, change to Not Accepting Invites." Player response: "Oh, sweet, thanks!" Player starts getting tells asking if he wants to join a team. Player response: "Ok, that kind of worked, but I'm still being pelted with tells." Another player responds: "Type in /hide and choose your poison." Player: "Sweeeeet." |
For instance I have to get fricken spammed by tells/invites/request etc before I get the urge to disappear. Since that rarely happens I seldom feel the need to hide. So in my case I'd never identify the problem to the point where I'd feel inclined to ask 1. how do I stop invites and 2. How do I hide.
I play fallout 3 when I don't want to be around people. When I play an MMO I expect and even want fairly high levels of communication. But I'm just one person, same as the person in the example you cited.
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It could just as easily come from the other direction. Someone mentioned in broadcast/local/team/global about being bothered, and another player mentions that ability to Hide and how to do it.|
Originally Posted by BBQ_Pork
But to ask about hide would require knowing that yes, there ARE people who are not visible on /search or that there is a /hide feature.
Analogy, possibly a bad one: I wouldn't ask what those guys were doing behind my house if I didn't first know that there were guys behind my house. But seriously? I have no idea what the numbers really are and I'm just making idle speculation. Feel free to ignore it. |
Edit: Perhaps someone is working on their AE arc, and are tired of responding to tells asking if they want to team, or they're going to be spending time in the tailor, or base editing. Those are easily situations in which one would use the Hide from Searches function.
Another separate issue is when Hide carries over from one character to another. If I used Hide on one character, logged off then logged back on to another character, that Hide always carries over for me even though looking at the Hide dialog it shows nothing checked. This could easily skew the numbers for people that only 'Hide' on occasion.
I started looking at this thread, with the idea that if 11-14% was "max" then 12.5% was aggressive. On the other hand, I think that we've got less than 25% hidden, so I may end up with the same total numbers.
From 10:56 PM to 11:28 Eastern (1 hour earlier Central) all American servers except the top 2 were between 200 and 300 (210 and 274, precisely.) So estimating 250 for each, that's 2250 not counting the big 2. A little lower since there were more under 250 than above.
Freedom had 1176 and Virtue had 1293. So we're at approximately 2450 on the big 2. 4700 total. Maybe 4600 since I was generous on the smaller servers.
So that's a weekend night, just about the same time- matches pretty closely with Billz's data point.
I would guess that's a bit below the 11-14% range rather than right in the middle, but that's an unsupported guess. With 10% online sunday night and 25% hidden I get 61,000 subs, but that's two big handwaves.
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So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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I think forumgoers are more likely to voluntarily share that knowledge with the new players they meet in pugs, or various channels. I know I've explained how to use /hide and to set flags to not accepting invites when someone asked about soloing or if they needed teams to do everything.
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Originally Posted by BBQ_Pork
But to ask about hide would require knowing that yes, there ARE people who are not visible on /search or that there is a /hide feature.
Analogy, possibly a bad one: I wouldn't ask what those guys were doing behind my house if I didn't first know that there were guys behind my house. But seriously? I have no idea what the numbers really are and I'm just making idle speculation. Feel free to ignore it. |
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Why do dismiss the notion that no problem exists? All you have to do is go up to player questions and read the "Rude Tells" thread to see that there are quite a few people out there that behave in a manner that encourages players to seek out information on being able to /hide from them.
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Originally Posted by Frosticus
Of course, but that assumes a problem that requires a solution where no problem necessarily exists.
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I'm not seeing the correlation between getting (likely rare) rude tells and wanting to hide from everyone.|
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Why do dismiss the notion that no problem exists? All you have to do is go up to player questions and read the "Rude Tells" thread to see that there are quite a few people out there that behave in a manner that encourages players to seek out information on being able to /hide from them.
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Getting rude tells would lead to /ignore, /gignore, and /petition well before it would lead to learning about /hide. I
That said, I'm not dismissing that some people can and do ask about how to hide. People eventually ask about everything. I've never actually seen anyone ask about it in almost 5 years of playing and answering BC questions and I've seen a lot of weird questions asked. That of course is not indicative of people not asking about it, but rather just that I haven't seen anyone ask about the function.
I think we're entering a grasping at straws phase of the conversation.
The fact is that there's a thread showing 1/3 of the *responding* player population utilizing /hide regularly. While it's easy to throw out the "well forum readers are different" argument, it's just as easy to counter with "people find the information they seek cuz the internet has answers."
Because of that, I'll go with the information gathered and consider it good to go rather that dismissing it based on the highly dubious claim that forumites are some completely altered creatures that don't play like other people do.
Be well, people of CoH.
Why not just run it from the other end? According to NCSoft's Q1 earnings report, their sales for CoX were $2,961,000. (The won is weaker now than in Q1).
I'm going to consider box sales a wash, since they're around $15, and include a month's sub anyway.
At $15/mo, this is 65,800 subs
At $14/mo, this is 70,500 subs
At $13/mo, this is 75,900 subs
If we assume each account bought 1 $10 pack during that time frame
At $15/mo, this is 53,800 subs
At $14/mo, this is 56,900 subs
At $13/mo, this is 60,400 subs
Almost certainly the real number is somewhere in the midst of all this. I think 60-70,000 is a good estimate. (Which, coincidentally, is around where the other methods are converging).
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Originally Posted by Frosticus
I'm not seeing the correlation between getting (likely rare) rude tells and wanting to hide from everyone.
Getting rude tells would lead to /ignore, /gignore, and /petition well before it would lead to learning about /hide. I That said, I'm not dismissing that some people can and do ask about how to hide. People eventually ask about everything. I've never actually seen anyone ask about it in almost 5 years of playing and answering BC questions and I've seen a lot of weird questions asked. That of course is not indicative of people not asking about it, but rather just that I haven't seen anyone ask about the function. |
It's not that they come out and ask how to /hide, I believe they find out about it when asking what options that can help them resolve what they find to be annoying.
For example when someone asks me about dealing with someone who keeps spamming tells asking for invites, I explain about the /ignores, petitions, notes/stars, flag settings, and then I also explain that they can use /hide and it's various choices as a preventative measure to cut down on the spam because people using the search tool won't find them. Only people passing them in a zone will see them.
I always include an explanation of /hide when I'm answering those types of questions.
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I thought those numbers from the reports were for all of NCSoft, not CoX. Or have I just not seen one with it broken down into components yet?
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Brillig may have to catch me up: Why not just run it from the other end? According to NCSoft's Q1 earnings report, their sales for CoX were $2,961,000. (The won is weaker now than in Q1). |
Dec out.
If you go here:
http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/quarterly.aspx
and download the report, page 5 of the PDF, Sales Breakdown shows the sales by game on the right. In 2010Q1, CoH/V did 3,348 million Won.
Aion did 71,235 
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Not really an entirely fair comparison since those global results don't split AION USA from AION Korea. For reference, here's the slide in question:|
Originally Posted by Brillig
If you go here:
http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/quarterly.aspx and download the report, page 5 of the PDF, Sales Breakdown shows the sales by game on the right. In 2010Q1, CoH/V did 3,348 million Won. Aion did 71,235 |
Now, what you might notice from this picture is that the majority of NCSoft's profit comes from the Korean markets where Lineage 1 and Lineage 2 still have strong performance. This is also the market where AION simply dominates.
Once you take AION's Korean performance out of the picture and look at the US Market alone, well, that's when things don't look so rosy for the game in the US market.
Mmm, since it's not sliced explicitly it's hard to say.
But since NA did a total of 12,892 million Won. Even assuming that all of Guild Wars and CoH/V is NA, that leaves 7,162 from L/L2/AION. If the proportions for those games in NA are the same as they are globally, that still puts AION ahead of our beloved City at 3,428 million Won.
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I agree it is probably a nit not worth picking. If our numbers were higher then it would matter more, but I believe the numbers are low enough that a variance of ~20% attributed to hidden players won't make much of a difference in the final numbers.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
I think we're entering a grasping at straws phase of the conversation.
The fact is that there's a thread showing 1/3 of the *responding* player population utilizing /hide regularly. While it's easy to throw out the "well forum readers are different" argument, it's just as easy to counter with "people find the information they seek cuz the internet has answers." Because of that, I'll go with the information gathered and consider it good to go rather that dismissing it based on the highly dubious claim that forumites are some completely altered creatures that don't play like other people do. |
20% of a million is a lot of players. 20% of nothing isn't. We are on the lower end of the scale.
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Excellent, thanks!
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Brillig points: If you go here: http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/quarterly.aspx and download the report, page 5 of the PDF, Sales Breakdown shows the sales by game on the right. In 2010Q1, CoH/V did 3,348 million Won. Aion did 71,235
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Dec out.
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Hiding from searches is not the same as hiding from everyone.
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Originally Posted by Frosticus
I'm not seeing the correlation between getting (likely rare) rude tells and wanting to hide from everyone.
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@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
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Originally Posted by Catwhoorg
Hiding from searches is not the same as hiding from everyone.
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Exactly. The /hide feature has several options available that allows us to customize it to fit our needs.
Hide Options
- Hide and block all Invite Options
- Hide from Tells (Private Messages)
- Hide from Global Chat Channels
- Hide from Global Friends
- Hide from Server Friends
- Hide from Supergroup
- Hide from Searches
For example option 2 will put a muzzle on an annoying pest long enough to discourage him without having to clutter up ones ignore lists and it will still allow one to be seen on searches.
Option 1 will stop annoying blind invites leaving one free to turn it off when one decides to accept a politely worded tell looking for a teammate.
Option 1 and 7 are perfect for the soloist seeking peace and quiet.
-we are more knowledgeable about the game and might be more inclined to solo
-we know more of the global channels thus removing our need to be a part of the larger and less organized system
-we have access to more organized events/teams and subgroups
Whether any of that translates to any sort of statistically significant difference I have no idea