The Digital Dozen: 18 February 2013

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 10 February 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	34.9	23,678	-8.3
2	2	Guild Wars 2	19.6	13,330	-12.6
3	4	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.2	6,940	+2.1
4	3	Tera	9.5	6,435	-23.6
5	6	Aion	5.4	3,700	+9.2
6	5	Eve Online	4.5	3,070	-13.8
7	8	Lord of the Rings Online	3.1	2,115	-12.6
8	9	The War Z	3.1	2,093	+12.7
9	7	Planetside 2	3.0	2,047	-17.2
10	10	Metin 2	2.7	1,853	+8.5
11	11	APB: Reloaded	2.1	1,430	-14.7
12	12	Star Trek Online	1.7	1,211	-13.6

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 67,902

Last week was apparently a busy week in real life for the Xfire community as the number of hours spent playing the top twelve most popular MMORPGs declined by 9.2%.  The leaders of the downturn in percentage terms were Tera (-23.6%), Planetside 2 (-17.2%) and APB: Reloaded (-14.7%).  The two games most successful in bucking the trend were The War Z (+12.7%) and Aion (+9.2%).

A Technical Glitch?   I'm not sure if everything was working correctly with Xfire on Sunday.  I think I saw some strange behavior on the Xfire site so I am not really looking at the raw numbers this week.

One Week?  Did Tera's move to the free-to-play model only move the Korean import past Star Wars: The Old Republic for one week?  That depends on how well SWTOR's Game Update 1.7 is received.  In addition to adding "The Relics of the Gree" event to Illum the Bioware devs added a new "Reputation" system that affects all of a players characters on a server.  Next week should be interesting.

First Person SOE - I've wondered about the ability of Planetside 2 to remain on the list given all of the complaining about hacks and aimbots I keep reading about on the forums.  But the game has consistently remained ranked in the 7-9 position throughout 2013 so far.  With the current lack of MMOFPS games on the market for the PC the SOE product could find a steady niche in the market.