Report: Average Old Republic server has less than 350 players online
How many players are playing The Old Republic at any given time? The numbers are shockingly low.
Although it launched to great fanfare, it's clear that The Old Republic is struggling. Electronic Arts revealed a startling drop of 25 percent of its subscriber base since launch, and has since announced layoffs at BioWare Austin, the team behind the expensive MMO. But, how dire is the situation, really?
One dedicated fan wanted to find out exactly how many people are on The Old Republic's servers. "What is going to happen when server transfers go live," SWTOR user Scorpienne asked. "How many people are on which servers?"
According to Scorpienne's calculations, the "Total Estimated Worldwide Population of all servers" for the past two weeks is 73,693. That figure simply represents the average number of people logged in at a given time, not the total number of players that have logged in over the two week period. "It's probable that not every player is logged in all the time," the report clarifies.
The most populated server on SWTOR appears to be The Fatman, with an average of 2006 players at any given time. This "theoretical average population" is simply an average however, and Scorpienne notes that it "underestimates the peak population and overestimates the off-peak population." However, with 214 servers currently active, the less popular servers are especially empty. In fact, the average server will have only 344 players at any given time (more for RP PvP, less for PvP).
With players so spaced out, it's clear that server consolidations must happen. No wonder one fan of the game jokingly described The Old Republic as "the best single player game on the market."
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Report: Average Old Republic server has less than 350 players online.
How many players are playing The Old Republic at any given time? The numbers are shockingly low.-
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1.5 mil subs x $15/month = $22.5 mil/month. Factor in game sales, and they're probably close to making that back about now.
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Ya, I don't think they will take a loss on this but its a shame that this will lose momentum fairly quickly.
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they probably need to pay 1/2 to lucasarts dont forget
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Not every game can be diablo 3.
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I say the tell Khem Val to put out a little, amirite??
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No, not really. He's taking a loose interpretation of information posted about five months ago now.
Toward the beginning of this year they had said there were significant complications with transfers & mergers, and it wouldn't be available for some time. The reason they cited was complications with the legacy system. Shortly after they mentioned how they'd roll out transfers -- Oceanic first, and then Americas/EU.
It's now end of May, and since then they've demonstrated some of the transfer capabilities, outlined how the legacy system would work, and (last I checked) have started the Oceanic transfers. The Americas/EU transfers should be available soon, if they aren't already.
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They do, but it's taken quite a bit of work to get the system up and running.
They had a manual/prototype process in a few months back (prior to 1.2) to get high level characters/guilds into the ptr. About a month or so ago they had the Oceanic transfers up and running, so people in Aus/NZ who were playing on the Americas could get their characters transferred locally.
I haven't paid attention to any recent developments, but I believe their plan was to have more open transfers (or population based transfers) available to everyone shortly after the Oceanic transfer.
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I re-rolled on Fatman about a month and a half ago. It's a much better experience since I can actually find groups with little to no trouble at all. I couldn't say the same on my original server.
I like SWTOR well enough to justify paying 15 dollars sporadically until I get to 50 just so I can finish my class story because I very much like the leveling experience on a populated server such as fatman.
Right now this game has amazing potential but has been dragged down by stupid design decisions and lack of foresight. This game has the very real possibility of being amazing if you give it another year; enough time to polish and add tons more content.....the problem is that is way too far away...bioware fucked themselves by not having immediate server consolidation and refinement of 50 PvP at release.-
Next issue has server transfers.
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Yeah, I cringed when I saw that go up. And I wrote this!
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LOL yeah they happen to use a cloud MMO engine that could be a issue :) all well its nice dreaming.
Still if dudes can make the private servers for Wow and others you would think it could be possible for the devs to do this.. man I have to stop this its not going to happen especially with the engine they used :(-
Why are all servers now referred to as "clouds"? It's the same old TCP/UDP server that's been around for the past 30 years (or more).
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Can you compare that to other mmos? How many does WoW have on average at any given time?
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With the rapid decline of TOR, the collapse of 38 Studios and the boondoggle that Elder Scrolls Online seems like it may turn into, you probably won't see many more games trying to ape the WOW model. It's clear at this point that was a one-time deal. I'm hopeful that Titan will be the kick in the pants the MMO genre badly needs.
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I'm intrigued by Titan. New franchise, pressure of WoW's massive success, many of the WoW dream team now on it...
Will it be F2P or subs? Will it be future or fantasy or something else? How far will they deviate from the now rather tired WoW design elements? Will it achieve remotely the success of WoW given that it's the first new setting Blizzard are doing in forever? Probably, they really have the golden touch and huge fanbase.
So many questions, so much potential, I can't wait to hear more eventually.
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How long before F2P?
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Maybe next year, they will keep a premium tier and do F2P on some level.
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I gave it an honest shot, even taking 2 guys to 50 (the second being a tank because tanks were in demand at one point) but there's just no tools to get you into the dungeons and raids at the endgame. You have to sit on the imperial fleet spamming LFG like it's 2007 or something. I found I could either sit in trade chat trying to fill up a group for 45 minutes to an hour, or I could go do 3 dungeons in WoW in that time.
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Concurrent numbers of ~75k is still decent. Back when Counter-Strike had concurrents of ~100,000 that meant ~1-1.5 million unique players in a 24 hour period. So we can estimate that SWTOR still has 500,000-750,000 active players based on CS's stats and the fact that people tend to stay logged in longer when play MMOs as opposed to FPS's.
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Sounds about right. I've ditched the game after being enthusiastic about it for a few months... Diablo 3 and Day Z killed it for me.
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Also 2k average pop on The Fatman... which is the #1 pop server AFAIK. Kinda sad. Thats not even a full WoW server (AFAIK again).
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With EA's Riccitello clearly distancing EA from TOR to calm investor's minds in recent comments, then the layoffs at Bioware Austin, it's clear EA is disappointed in the results so they're going to cut and run. EA got what they came for and are more than happy to let the game languish.
If they were smart, Bioware Austin would get hard to work on the free to play conversion NOW and have it ready to go by the game's first anniversary. Cryptic, PlayNC, and Turbine have proven F2P can keep a game alive AND profitable. If Bioware stays on the same path, TOR will just continue to bleed subscribers with a bleak future outlook.
I'd love to have a reason to return to TOR. But after the first two months, the game lost my interest and the mismanagement drove me away. They got to pad their sub numbers with my 3 month time card and the extra 30 days they handed out, but I certainly didn't log in during any of that time. -
The group think @ BioWare for this game was so, so strong.
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I didn't think it was a bad game. Unfortunately they made the leveling way too quick at launch and didn't have enough content to cover for that.
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If anything over-leveling caused me to skip some stuff I probably would have taken my time to do.
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unimpressive! Most unimpressive!
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Hi guys. I heard you went over some of my population estimates. For the record, the data is here...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aregkvys5QFodFJ2OWN5U0hwaVFBYWdqUUh1WmdZUFE
You're welcome to take a look at it firsthand. If you'd like the guided tour, email me and I can walk you through it.
The shorter version is that this guy...
http://inquisitive-myths.blogspot.com/2012/05/population-numbers-behind-server-status.html
....wrote a program that alerted him when a server changed status. He then went in and /who-ed that server by level band to get an idea of the number of people on the server. So if a server went from light to standard, he'd /who the server, and found out that the number of people on that server was X. Wash, rinse, repeat, and then he can say with some confidence that the # of people on a just-turned-standard server was between 500 and 1,500. The spread may come from a few different things...
1) People logging on and off as he takes the time to census the server.
2) Different servers may have different (BW-determined) values for standard, (500 is standard on X server, 1,500 is standard on Y server.)
3) BW may have changed the capacity of the servers (500 is standard on X server last month, 1,500 is standard on X server this month.)
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So if you look at his data, you might estimate that...
Light is less than 500 logins.
Medium is from about 500 to 1,500 logins.
Standard is from about 1500 to 2,250-2,500 logins (let's call that 2,375).
Heavy is from about 2,250-2,500 (let's call that 2,375) to 3,000 logins.
Full is greater than 3,000 logins.
We know and love www.torstatus.net, right? They report a value they call ø, which is the 2 week average population index, sampled every hour, where 1 is light, 2 is standard and so on.
So we know what the population levels mean in terms of logins... and we know the average population levels for all servers... combine in a spreadsheet, and there you go! :-)
For my analysis, I assume that...
Light = 250 logins (average of 0 and 500)
Medium = 1000 logins (average of 500 and 1,500)
Standard = 1937.5 logins (average of 1,500 and 2,375)
Heavy = 2687.5 logins (average of 2,375 and 3,000)
If a server has ø less than 1, it's that ø value x 250. So for The Defenestrator with a phi of 0.99, I can say that the average number of simultaneous concurrent logins is probably a hair under 250 logins.
If a server has ø between 1 and 2, it gets 250 logins PLUS (ø-1)x 1,000 logins. For my server, Sanctum of the Exalted with a ø of 1.09, that's 250 + (0.09x1000) logins or about 340 logins.
If a server has ø between 2 and 3, it gets 250 logins PLUS 1000 logins PLUS (ø-2)x 1,937.5 logins. For the Fatman with a ø of 2.47, that's 250 + 1000 + (0.47x1,937.5) logins or about 2,160 logins.
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The trick here is realizing that this is based on a 14 day average status, so that's dead slack times and peak times. It also doesn't get at subscriber numbers. For instance, a measurement at noon might only count the stay-at-home parents, a few folks taking a sick day, and some retired folks. A measurement at 3 in the morning might only count the people that work 2nd shift, and the real late night crowd. The average number of logins might be the same at the two measurement times, but it's two *completely different* groups of people, so it underestimates the number of subscribers by 50%. However, it still gives you an idea of how many people might be around to group with, PVP with, or buy auctions on the GTN.
It's sort of like taking a picture of a stadium every day for a month and counting the number of people in the stadium. Some days it's just a cleaning crew. Some days it's a few people for practice. Some days it's packed full for the championship game. Maybe you have some people that are there for every game. Maybe some folks only come once or twice a season to watch their favorite out of town team. Maybe some folks only come to day games because they work third shift. You might know the average number of people in the stadium, but that's a small fraction of the total number of people who've been in the stadium. It's imperfect information, but it does allow you to compare stadiums so you can choose where to set up your beer stand.
As a further analysis, I keep careful info on my own server.
Survey here... http://www.thethirteenthlegion.torportal.com/ click SURVEY on the top right
Data here... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aregkvys5QFodDlvU05lQ3o2S3ZrYU9SYjRwM29OSnc#gid=0
Analysis here... http://i1204.photobucket.com/albums/bb420/scorpienne/General%20SWTOR%20Screenshots/rep_imp_ratio_1to50unpaired.jpg
So I can say with a fair degree of certainty that Sanctum might have an average pop of 340 people as a 24hr average over the last two weeks, but that there are 600-1,000 people on during peak hours.
The only real way to get at these demographics is for BW to release their data, but I don't know if they are willing or able to do so. The next best way is go in and /who the server a bunch, but I don't have time for that. This analysis is a shortcut to get at that data without nearly as much work. I hope I've been clear where I'm making assumptions and what those assumptions are. If you've got a better analysis, or a way to refine some of these assumptions, I'd love to know about it.
Paige
aka Scorpienne
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