The Digital Dozen: 15 January 2013

This Week's Rankings:  The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 13 January 2013.  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	40.6	31,730	-1.9
2	2	Guild Wars 2	19.3	15,068	+0.2
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.9	8,550	-3.1
4	4	Aion	5.1	4,006	+7.0
5	5	Eve Online	4.7	3,670	+5.6
6	7	Planetside 2	3.8	2,934	+9.6
7	6	Lord of the Rings Online	3.5	2,770	+2.5
8	9	The War Z	2.8	2,189	+3.8
9	--	Tera	2.6	2,001	+188.3
10	8	Metin 2	2.4	1,859	-17.5
11	11	Maple Story	2.3	1,833	+11.2
12	12	APB: Reloaded	2.0	1,603	-2.0

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 101,699  

The time the Xfire community seems to have found a steady level of time spent playing MMORPGs as the time spent Sunday only increased by 0.3% over the previous week.  The game making the biggest splash was Tera which saw its time played increase by 188.3% while two game, The Secret World (-18.2%) and Metin 2 (-17.5%) experienced the biggest drops in interest.

Eight is Enough - Tera made a huge jump in popularity, leaping back into the Digital Dozen after an absence of 24 weeks on the strength of first a price drop of the box price down to $5 on Amazon on 4 January and the announcement on 9 January of the game going free-to-play in February.  If the game doesn't go F2P until an unannounced date in February why the sudden interest of jumping into the game now?  Because if players purchase the game before the launch of F2P then they receive Founder status.  The biggest difference between Founders and those who purchase a subscription after the game goes F2P is that Founders get eight character slots on each server and non-Founders only receive 2, with the option to purchase more.  Were people taking advantage of the free trial to see if they want to take advantage?  Or did people look at the Amazon price and figure that $5 for purchasing all the character slots was a good deal and start playing now?

If it weren't for bad luck... - Funcom can't seem to catch a break with the timing of The Secret World.  First at launch they did fairly well until the tidal wave Guild Wars 2 launched 6 weeks after TSW.  Next TSW went buy-to-play and started showed up on the list 3 of the 4 weeks following that move.  Now En Masse made its move with Tera and The Secret World is dropping out of sight again.