The Digital Dozen: 10 April 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 8 April 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	59.2	107,755
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	13.8	25,045
3	3	Aion	7.3	13,218
4	4	Eve Online	3.6	6,619
5	6	Lord of the Rings Online	2.6	4,798
6	5	Guild Wars	2.4	4,411
7	7	Metin 2	2.4	4,406
8	8	APB:Reloaded	2.2	4,071
9	9	Need For Speed World	1.8	3,360
10	10	Star Trek Online	1.6	2,896
11	12	Maple Story	1.5	2,749
12	11	Rift	1.4	2,637

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 241,062

An Extra Hour:  One of the criticisms of using Xfire to gauge the popularity of MMORPGs is that the numbers can be unreliable.  That is a major reason I came up with a scoring system of my own.  This week is clearly one of those weeks in which the Xfire numbers look funny.  This week the number of hours played jumped 20.6% from last week.  While I don't record the number, a closer look at the games numbers indicates that the average times for a game player jumped one hour.  I expect to see a decline of 20% next week.

Data Now Available:  The data I have collected for this column is now available as a Google document, assuming that I have set everything up correctly.  Click here to see the data.