The Digital Dozen: 20 November 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 18 November 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	37.5	34,645	-9.0
2	2	Guild Wars 2	28.7	26,550	+32.5
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	12.9	11,925	+123.9
4	4	Aion	3.5	3,223	-6.8
5	6	Eve Online	3.4	3,120	-2.0
T6	8	Metin 2	2.8	2,584	+2.6
T6	7	Lord of the Rings Online	2.8	2,584	-6.3
8	5	The War Z (Alpha)	2.5	2,289	-32.7
9	9	APB: Reloaded	1.6	1,517	-23.2
10	--	Maple Story	1.4	1,319	+74.5
11	--	Rift	1.4	1,318	+52.7
12	--	Star Trek Online	1.4	1,302	N/A

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 114,719  

In one of the wildest weeks in the short history of The Digital Dozen the members of the Xfire community increased the amount of time spent playing MMORPGs by 7.6%.  The games gaining the most playtime in percentage terms were Star Wars: The Old Republic (123.9%), Maple Story (74.5%), Rift (52.7%) and Guild Wars 2 (32.5%).  The games seeing big declines in playtime were The War Z (-32.7%) and APB Reloaded (-23.2%).

 

A Deluge of Content -  Apart from Maple Story the games with the biggest gains all released new content.  On 14 November Trion released Rift's first expansion, Storm Legion.  The next day Bioware released patch 1.5 for SW:TOR, turning the game free-to-play.  And on Friday Guild Wars 2 saw the launch of a major live event and a new dungeon, The Lost Shores.  I expect to see GW2 resume a slide downwards but how will SW:TOR and Rift do in the coming weeks?

The Trifecta - For the first time since 15 April Xfire players spent more than 10,000 hours playing three different MMORPGs: World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Back in April the three games were WoW, SW:TOR and Aion.

 

Updated Data - After a month's delay I have updated the Google document with all of the Xfire data collected.  Most of the data goes back to shortly before the games made their first appearance on the list, but some games like WoW, SW:TOR and Eve Online have data back to the beginning of the year.