I have to admit that if there is one CCP employee I don't trust it is CCP's Chief Marketing Officer David Reid. I'm in good company among those who follow the MMORPG industry and not just Eve Online. I think the "Tabula Rasa is triple A and here to stay" interview with Massively a couple of months before NCSoft announced the game was closing will stick with a lot of people for a long time. I don't hold the claim that RIFT took 600,000 players from WoW in 2011 against Reid against him (too seriously) but it does show a tendency towards hyperbole. So when he announced at Fanfest in his CCP Presents! appearance that the Tranquility + DUST numbers had set a PCU record for a single game shard but wasn't going to release the number or the date, I thought, "Here we go again."
Of course, CCP Pokthulhu does have to contend with the different culture at CCP compared to his previous stints at NCSoft and Trion. CCP is one of the most open companies in the industry in providing user numbers. More specifically, CCP provides the concurrency numbers not only when players log in but through an API for enterprising web developers and other programmers.
Those who read the blog know that my preferred source for player concurrency is Eve-Offline.net. Run by Chribba, reading the source code of the page provides data for Tranquility going back to 2006. In fact, the dates and numbers I used in my latest post listing all the days where the PCU exceeded 60,000 (except for the latest record) came from asking Chribba for the information.
Last Monday Chribba provided a new feature with the launch of Uprising; concurrency numbers for DUST 514. I'm really interested to see what the numbers are beginning on Tuesday when the game officially launches. So far the record is 4,662 set on 6 May. But perhaps more importantly is I have an independent source of information about concurrency in DUST. A lot of people are going to throw out numbers about the success of DUST. But having Chribba providing concurrency numbers for DUST 514 means we have an honest and reliable source of information to check some of the claims, whether those claims are on the forums or in an official press release.
