Guess what the total population is?

[SelfRez]

This is one of the über threads again...

We could as easily estimate the amount of forum handicaps.

[Buffarse]

Subscription numbers while mildly interesting is an extremely poor measure of game health.

I am subbed until February 2014. Have logged in twice over the past 2 months. I show up as an active subscriber but I am anything but an active player at the moment.

I would suggest that for AoC any figure above 10000 subscribers for AoC is utter fantasy. As for active players I would be VERY surprised to see a number over 5000. It's not THAT hard to guess within a few 1000. If you make a number of assumptions as follows

1. MOST active players will be a member of a guild
2. MOST of the top 20 guilds based on activity contain mostly active members
3. MOST active guilds have anything between 20-60 active members

Once you start off with this, assume theres 20 active guilds on all the servers, average out active membership to be 40 members and do some calcs.

20 guilds * 40 members = 800 active players

5 primary servers (Mitra, Set, Fury, Tyranny, Crom) = 5*800 = 4000

Add another 1000 for anything I've missed and you get 5000.

Thats HUGELY optimistic though. I know that many of the "top" guilds on Crom struggle to fill their raids each week. That implies that even in the top 10 most active guilds you'd struggle to get near to 40 active players. Theres a question over what "active" actually means too . E.g. if I log into the game for 4h once a week to raid, does that make me "active"? Yet I know of a number of people who do just that.

Something else to consider.

When the game started, Funcom stated quite openly the servers would at most take about 2,500 people logged in concurrently. There were even login queues (I know hard to believe) back then. I've not hit a login queue on Crom EVER.

I would be VERY shocked that any server has more than 600 concurrent logins at any time.

Games done guys, stop worrying about the number of people playing and just play. It is what it is and is hugely unlikely to change significantly now.

Buff

[KullOfValusia]

Subscription numbers while mildly interesting is an extremely poor measure of game health.

I am subbed until February 2014. Have logged in twice over the past 2 months. I show up as an active subscriber but I am anything but an active player at the moment.

I would suggest that for AoC any figure above 10000 subscribers for AoC is utter fantasy. As for active players I would be VERY surprised to see a number over 5000. It's not THAT hard to guess within a few 1000. If you make a number of assumptions as follows

1. MOST active players will be a member of a guild
2. MOST of the top 20 guilds based on activity contain mostly active members
3. MOST active guilds have anything between 20-60 active members

Once you start off with this, assume theres 20 active guilds on all the servers, average out active membership to be 40 members and do some calcs.

20 guilds * 40 members = 800 active players

5 primary servers (Mitra, Set, Fury, Tyranny, Crom) = 5*800 = 4000

Add another 1000 for anything I've missed and you get 5000.

Thats HUGELY optimistic though. I know that many of the "top" guilds on Crom struggle to fill their raids each week. That implies that even in the top 10 most active guilds you'd struggle to get near to 40 active players. Theres a question over what "active" actually means too . E.g. if I log into the game for 4h once a week to raid, does that make me "active"? Yet I know of a number of people who do just that.

Something else to consider.

When the game started, Funcom stated quite openly the servers would at most take about 2,500 people logged in concurrently. There were even login queues (I know hard to believe) back then. I've not hit a login queue on Crom EVER.

I would be VERY shocked that any server has more than 600 concurrent logins at any time.

Games done guys, stop worrying about the number of people playing and just play. It is what it is and is hugely unlikely to change significantly now.

Buff

I'm beginning to agree with some of the commentary here. For the most part I'm only seeing around 500~800 level 80's on set us at peak hours(probably all the 80's subbed).

Thus, the total us population is probably around 5000~10000 including all the f2pers.

This population can only get smaller since some huge box games (elder scrolls online) is coming out in the future. Also, its good thinking by management to get the current f2p people to sub up. Hopefully, we can keep these players that have been with us...

[AngryBarb]

This sounds more and more like a Gitbin thread...

[Manilavanilla]

people are mixing up concurrent online users with subscription numbers.

are you online 24 hours a day 7 days a week because you have a sub?

So my guess is the game has 300000 subs, a bit less than EVE

[Sente]

Theres a question over what "active" actually means too . E.g. if I log into the game for 4h once a week to raid, does that make me "active"? Yet I know of a number of people who do just that.

Well, the question then is what is it you actually want to measure and for what purpose?

That the game is doing ok financially?
That there are enough players to fill X amount of raids every week?
That there are enough players that are interested in doing dungeon runs at level Y?
That Z % of the paying players might not be interested in doing X?

Financial information will to some extent point to the amount of people paying - how they actually use and spend their time with the game may vary quite a bit.

Given that there is a fair amount of guesses based various assumptions in this thread, the actual questions implicitly asked may vary quite a bit also - because person X's assumptions are not in line with person Y's implicit question.