The Digital Dozen: 14 October 2014

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 12 October 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	48.7	6,598	+4.3
2	2	Guild Wars 2	11.2	1.521	-25.8
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	11.0	1,495	+5.8
4	5	Final Fantasy XIV	5.0	676	-4.1
5	4	ArcheAge	4.9	670	-13.7
6	7	Aion	4.6	625	+5.4
7	6	EVE Online	3.9	528	-17.5
8	9	Tera	2.3	310	-28.7
9	10	Lord of the Rings Online	2.2	296	-2.0
10	8	Runescape	2.2	295	-33.3
11	11	Neverwinter	2.1	290	+12.0
12	--	Planetside 2	1.8	246	+7.9

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 13,550

 
On Sunday, the Xfire community saw the amount of time it spent playing its favorite MMORPGs fall by 4.6%.  The decline was led by Guild Wars 2 (-529 hours) while World of Warcraft (+271 hours) saw the biggest increase in time played over the previous Sunday.  APB: Reloaded fell out of The Digital Dozen after a two week stay, replaced by Planetside 2.

The Giant Is Awakening:  Blizzard is building up to the release of the Warlords of Draenor expansion for World of Warcraft next month with the release today of the pre-patch, The Iron Tide.  The first new content patch since the release of The Siege of Orgrimmar in September 2013, I expect to see the numbers for WoW start to swell again.  On Sunday, the first indications of that growth were shown, as WoW recorded its highest Digital Dozen score since 21 October 2012.

An eSports Decline?  I'm not really sure why Guild Wars 2 suffered such a drastic fall in the Xfire community's time spent playing the game.  One possible explanation is that the North American Tournament of Glory Finals were held on Sunday.  Perhaps many people were glued to the action.  Perhaps more were drawn to the Twitch stream to wind a precursor weapon or a Mini Llama.  Whatever the reason, I'm interested to see if Xfire community returns to the game next week.

A Festival Decline?  I'm used to events like Blizzard's BlizzCon and CCP's Fanfest exciting players so that the number of hours played by the Xfire community increases.  But following Jagex's RuneFest 2014, held on Saturday, the amount of hours logged in the game fell by one-third.  We're the players just traveling and/or hungover?  We'll see if the engagement level returns next week.