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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

The Digital Dozen: 7 July 2014

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 6 July 2014.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.


Rank Prev Week Game ScoreHours Played +/- %
11World of Warcraft 41.3 6,886+7.3
22Guild Wars 212.22,033+2.1
34Star Wars: The Old Republic11.01,840+34.2
43Wildstar8.51,412-11.9
55Final Fantasy XIV6.21,038+18.1
66EVE Online5.0834+4.6
78Aion4.4735+9.7
87Tera3.3553-24.7
99Runescape2.6440-0.2
1011Vindictus1.9324-1.8
1110Elder Scrolls Online1.9310-16.9
1212Neverwinter1.5253-19.9
 
Total Digital Dozen Hours: 16,658

With no World Cup matches scheduled, the Xfire community turned back to playing video games.  Sunday saw members playing MMORPGs 4.6% more hours than the previous Sunday.  The games seeing the highest interest were World of Warcraft (+470 hours) and Star Wars: The Old Republic (+469 hours), while games still seeing declines were Wildstar (-191 hours) and Tera (-181 hours).

A Double XP Week - Bioware decided to allow North Americans to celebrate both Canada Day and the U.S. Independence Day with a Double XP Week that covered both nations holidays.  The week, running from 1-7 July, extended to both regular experience and legacy XP.  The 34.2% increase in the number of hours played seems to indicate the event was a hit with the Xfire community.

Addition By Subtraction - Final Fantasy XIV did well Sunday, just two days before the launch of Patch 2.3.  If all went well, the servers were back up and running as this post was published.  But in the week before the launch, Square Enix permanently banned over 1000 accounts for RMT activity.  Apparently that met the approval of the Xfire community, as activity went up 18.1% Sunday compared to the week before.

Not Impressed - Apparently, Wildstar's first content patch, the Strain Ultra-Drop, wasn't enough to keep the Xfire community engaged.  While Wildstar is doing much better with the Raptr community (the #2 MMORPG and increased playtime last week), the game witnessed another 11.9% drop in playtime this past Sunday amongst Xfire members.  Last week was when those who began playing at launch would have made to decision to subscribe or not.  That decision didn't go Carbine's way, at least for Xfire users.

8 comments:

  1. How do you check these numbers on Raptr? I created an account for this purpose, but didn't saw any "best played MMOs" or something like that on the program :/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 1. Go to "My Profile".
      2. Choose "Game Collection" on the left side.
      3. Click on "Discover Games"
      4. On the right-hand side, there is a listing titled "Raptr's Top Games Being Played." Go below the last game and click on "View All". That should display a window that will list the top 100 games.

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  2. It seems that Wildstar's launch has been very underwhelming. Less than 1k viewers on Twitch at almost all times (unless Towelliee is streaming), Xfire numbers down, forum activity down, and just an overall drop in activity across my friends (which, I know, is a small percentage). The ones who are sticking with the game have bought C.R.E.D.D., but for 30-50 other folks, they've already moved back into TOR/WoW/FFXIV. How do the Raptr numbers look in comparison?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wildstar was still hanging in comfortably as the #2 MMORPG and saw about a 10% increase in time played. Of course, all games saw an increase due to less World Cup matches and Wildstar's gains were less than a lot of games.

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  3. Here's what I find interesting: in Wildstar, currently CREDD is asoundingly cheap. Harvesting the thicket and festival at my house takes a minute and nets me ~8 gold. You can do that each hour if you want, and you can scale it up with sharing nodes with neighbors or having more alts. Personally, I tend to just harvest when I log in and out, which takes an hour a month for ~480g. Meanwhile, CREDD on my server currently goes for ~450g- it spiked to 600g when the subs came due on the 3rd, then dropped back down. Even if you're not high enough to set up your own thicket you can find others who will let your harvest theirs with a 50/50 split.

    And think, this is with all those bots pouring gold into the economy two weeks ago! To put things in context, this would be like if easily accessible PI in EVE provided 1b/hour isk (or 500m/hour if you're absolutely brand new to the game.)

    Whether or not Wildstar is doing well in terms of building a player base, it seems that they must have sold an incredible amount of CREDD at $20 a pop for the gold price of CREDD to be this low. I guess we'll see in an upcoming financial report.

    ReplyDelete
  4. That's incredibly cheap. On our server, it was over 3p per CREDD. One of my friends managed to stock up on 55 CREDD over a two week period by buying some vendor mat, salvaging it, and selling the parts. I have to wonder what will happen in the long run...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, 3p = 300g, so it's the same ballpark. Actually my server has some of the higher CREDD prices compared to, say, the RP server. I should also add that people like your friend are why I think it's high supply and not low demand driving the prices down, the demand for CREDD is highly elastic.with buyers stocking up as much as they can get.

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    2. Looking at the gold sellers on the list I watch, the median price was $16.10 per 1000g, with the cheapest price $12.55. The bans last week resulted in the RMT price going up.

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