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Tuesday, October 1, 2013

The Digital Dozen: 1 October 2013

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 29 September 2013.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank Prev Week Game ScoreHours Played +/- %
11World of Warcraft 41.7 16,442-4.5
22Guild Wars 216.86,616-0.9
33Final Fantasy XIV13.15,181-14.3
44Star Wars: The Old Republic8.93,513+14.7
56EVE Online4.41,750+0.2
67Tera3.21,264+8.5
79Planetside 22.4940+12.6
812RIFT2.3901+51.7
98Lord of the Rings Online2.0775-13.1
105Aion1.8715-63.3
11--Need For Speed World1.8707+22.3
1211Neverwinter1.6632-8.0
 
Total Digital Dozen Hours: 39,436

For a second week the Xfire community turned away from playing MMORPGs.  Sunday's 5.2% decline in playtime compared to the week before was led by percentage declines by Aion (-63.3%) and Final Fantasy XIV (-14.3%) along with a 4.5% decline for World of Warcraft.  Games bucking the downward trend were RIFT (+51.7%), Need for Speed World (+22.3%) and Star Wars: The Old Republic (+14.7%).

Melting Wings - Aion experienced a huge 63.3% decline in playtime on the last weekend of its month-long celebration of its 4th anniversary.  The Daeva's Day Event, which included cake buffs, pairs of 7-day wings, and special items for turning in feathers, is still running.  However, the feathers stopped dropping on the 25th which is when I noticed a big drop in log in times.  I guess in a free-to-play game once the shinies stop dropping in one game players look around for another game offering gifts.

Order Now, And Look What Else You Get - Patch 2.4 apparently didn't draw as many people into RIFT as expected, so Trion decided to give out 50% more experience to Patrons (subscribers) this weekend.  For the F2P players, Trion provided a Weekend Warrior bundle for sale in the cash shop to grant Patron status for 3 days so those players could also benefit from the event.  Hey, the plan worked!

Anticipation -  Sunday saw a 14.7% increase in the amount of time the Xfire community spent playing Star Wars: The Old Republic in advance of the scheduled release of Update 2.4: The Dread War today.  Unfortunately the deployment team at Bioware was equally impatient for the content and released it a day early, thus keeping many people from playing Monday.  Even when Bioware looks like it is on a roll they manage to stumble.  Hopefully the slip-up is not a portent of things to come.


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