| Rank | Prev Week | Game | Score | Hours Played | +/- % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | World of Warcraft | 75.0 | 21,141 | +157.2 |
| 2 | 2 | Guild Wars 2 | 4.8 | 1,357 | -21.2 |
| 3 | 3 | Star Wars: The Old Republic | 4.7 | 1,315 | -1.9 |
| 4 | 4 | ArcheAge | 3.9 | 1,102 | -15.3 |
| 5 | 5 | Final Fantasy XIV | 2.6 | 744 | -15.1 |
| 6 | 6 | EVE Online | 2.3 | 639 | -5.8 |
| 7 | 8 | Runescape | 1.4 | 407 | +3.0 |
| 8 | 9 | Tera | 1.3 | 377 | -0.8 |
| 9 | 7 | Aion | 1.3 | 362 | -24.1 |
| 10 | 10 | Lord of the Rings Online | 1.1 | 307 | -10.8 |
| 11 | -- | Elder Scrolls Online | 0.8 | 237 | +63.4 |
| 12 | 11 | APB: Reloaded | 0.8 | 217 | -13.6 |
Total Digital Dozen Hours: 28,205
Sunday saw a huge increase in the amount of time Xfire players spent logged into their favorite MMORPGs. The 74.1% increase in hours played was led by World of Warcraft (+12,921 hours) while the game experiencing the biggest decrease was Guild Wars 2 (-364 hours).
The Big Expansion - The 74.1% increase in the overall hours spent playing MMORPGs on Sunday was not caused by technical issues. World of Warcraft's latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor, launched last Thrusday. Despite launch issues like disconnection issues, extremely long login queues, and a DDoS attack at launch, the Xfire community still flocked to Azeroth to partake in the new content. However, I don't know if the Xfire client counts the time spent in queues toward the total played time. The average Xfire member spent 8.5 hours in the game Sunday. I expect the average to steadily decline over time.
Faster Leveling - In a week dominated by WoW, I was surprised that Elder Scrolls Online returned to the Digital Dozen after an 8 week absence. I'm assuming the big percentage gain in time the Xfire community spent logged into the Zenimax product was due to a change in XP requirements that was introduced in patch 1.5.4. Not only was the XP required to gain a Veteran Rank reduced from 1,432,550 to 1,000,000, but Veteran characters will also see increased XP gains from killing monsters of up to 5 ranks lower than the player character.
Being in a queue counts, though by Sunday the number of servers with queues had dropped by quite a bit.
ReplyDeleteStill more accurate than GuildWars 2. Last time I checked, Raptr and Xfire counted the launcher being up, as when you patch, as "played" time. I have about 4x time logged for GW2 than I have actually played because I patch up every so often just in case I might play.