The Digital Dozen: 8 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, 6 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	41.4	32,352	+6.6
2	2	Guild Wars 2	19.2	15,035	-0.8
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	11.3	8,819	+3.9
4	5	Aion	4.8	3,745	+10.5
5	6	Eve Online	4.4	3,474	+4.4
6	7	Lord of the Rings Online	3.5	2,702	-12.6
7	4	Planetside 2	3.4	2,677	-21.8
8	T9	Metin 2	2.9	2,253	+16.0
9	8	The War Z	2.7	2,109	-19.8
10	11	The Secret World	2.2	1,688	-5.1
11	T9	Maple Story	2.1	1,648	-15.2
12	12	APB: Reloaded	2.1	1,635	-4.4

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 101,417  

The year 2013 began steadily for the Xfire community as the amount of hours spent playing MMORPGs on Sunday increased by 1.2% over the last Sunday of 2012.  The games leading the list in percentage gained were Metin 2 (16%) and Aion (10.5%) while the games seeing the largest drops were Planetside 2 (-21.8%) and The War Z (-19.8%).

Bad Press Catching Up?  Is the bad press over the Steam debacle finally catching up to The War Z?  Over the past two weeks the number of hours played by the Xfire community has plummeted by 29.4%.  This is not the first time the game has seen declining numbers as the number of hours played dropped 45% from 4 November to 2 December last year so the most recent drop is possibly the result of a game in beta needing additional work.

The Inevitable Slide - Planetside 2 has come back down to earth six weeks after launch, falling below Aion, Eve Online and Lord of the Rings Online.  PS2 continues the trend from 2012 of all new games seeing large decreases with a drop of 52.3% since the first Sunday after launch on 25 November.