The Digital Dozen: 7 January 2014

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 5 January 2014.  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	45.3	14,434	+6.2
2	2	Guild Wars 2	12.8	4,076	+12.3
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	9.0	2,872	+6.0
4	4	Final Fantasy XIV	7.6	2,421	+10.9
5	6	EVE Online	4.4	1,400	+11.9
6	5	Aion	4.0	1,284	-5.6
7	7	Tera	3.6	1,155	-1.4
8	8	Lord of the Rings Online	3.4	1,069	+3.5
9	9	Neverwinter	2.7	863	-14.1
10	11	RIFT	2.5	807	+1.5
11	12	Planetside 2	2.4	755	-2.6
12	--	Runescape	2.1	671	+51.5

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 31,807

2014 started out well as the Xfire community spent 5% more time playing the its 12 favorite MMORPGs as compared to the week before.  Games leading the surge were World of Warcraft (+846 hours) and Guild Wars 2 (+446 hours) while the game experiencing the biggest drop was Need for Speed World (-246 hours).  The drop in popularity also dropped NFSW out of the list.  Runescape replaced the game, making its first appearance after a nine week absence.

Making up for lost time.  Is part of the reason for the surge a desire to make up for lost time?  Of the top 5 games showing the greatest gains Sunday, only Final Fantasy XIV was not hit with a DDoS attack by DERP Trolling.  I would have included Star Wars: The Old Republic, but I'm not sure if the attack on EA.com took down access to SWTOR.  The only game attacked that saw less time spent playing on Sunday was Planetside 2.

Happy Birthday!  Of course, part of Runescape's rise is probably based on players celebrating the game's 13th anniversary on Saturday.  I imagine that part of the celebration continued on Sunday.  At least, Xfire players were celebrating.

Updated Data.  For those interested, I have updated the Google document with all of the Digital Dozen data with all of the 2013 information.