The Digital Dozen: 1 May 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 29 April 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played
1	1	World of Warcraft	56.1	75,149
2	2	Star Wars: The Old Republic	13.0	17,374
3	3	Aion	6.8	9,061
4	NR	Guild Wars 2 (Beta)	5.4	7,269
5	4	Eve Online	3.5	4,684
6	6	Lord Of The Rings Online	2.8	3,774
7	7	Metin 2	2.7	3,622
8	5	APB: Reloaded	2.6	3,453
9	NR	Tera	2.4	3,277
10	8	Guild Wars	1.7	2,315
11	9	Need For Speed World	1.5	2,043
12	11	Star Trek: Online	1.5	2,009

 Total MMORPG hours played Sunday:178,926 

New Kids On The Block:  Sunday saw the number of hours Xfire members play MMORPGs by 2% over the previous week.  Much of that increase is due to two games that make their debuts in The Digital Dozen this week, Guild Wars 2 and Tera.  Guild Wars 2 debuts at #4 with its first beta weekend.  This bodes well for the ArenaNet offering as Guild Wars still came in at #10 even with many of its players participating in the beta.  Tera makes its debut at #9 during its early access weekend for those who pre-ordered the game.  The official release is today.

The two games that dropped out of The Digital Dozen to make way for GW2 and Tera were Rift and Maple Story.

The Hulkageddon Effect:  What happens in a game when thousands of players start attacking other players who have no interest in fighting?  That is what is occurring now in Eve Online with the player-run Hulkageddon V event.  From 29 April to 29 May gankers will roam New Eden looking for unwary miners.  No place is safe, including the normally safer areas of high security space.

So how will that impact the amount of people actually playing Eve?  Sunday's numbers showed a 3.9% decrease in hours played in a week that saw an overall increase of 2%.

Starting next week I'll compare the hours played by the Xfire community vs the numbers provided by Eve Offline to see if there is a correlation.  The daily average numbers on Eve Offline are delayed by 7 days so I'll start making graphs next week.