Version 3.7 thoughts and comments

With v3.7 I revised some MMORPG's, and retracted some datapoints. I had to retract the last 2 datapoints from WoW East and WoW West as it became clear my estimates were based old information in one case and unreliable information in the other.

Furthermore, because the WoW East and WoW West are less reliable than WoW Global, even with the last 2 retractions, I made a separate rating for WoW East and WoW West and downgraded their rating to B.

I realize that I must revise the datapoints more carefully before publishing them. I haven't had to do many retractions in the past, and I will do my best to avoid it in the future.

That being said, v3.7 became more than just a revision. I was able to add 2 new Asian MMORPG's, Wen Dao and Journey to the West, because I found a second datapoint for each of them.

I was able to add many new datapoints for EVE, including subscriptions, trials and even Chinese subscriptions. For SWTOR and STO there are is also a new datapoint, they are estimates and you can check the comments on the V3.7 version notes to get an idea on how I came there. Because STO went F2P I changed it from SS to AA.

I fixed some issues and cosmetic stuff and last but not least added vertical gridlines to easier detect misalignment problems, add this to the improved checks and sums ( internal only )from v3.6 and nothing can go wrong anymore ( I wish :p ).

About EVE Online

I received more datapoints from CCP, they truly are the most trustworthy source in the industry. They kept providing me with datapoints when EVE Online was in the decline. But this time they have better news. Their subscriptions have gotten back up to 352,5k in March 2012 from a lowpoint of 340k in December 2012. They had a little dip in between with the release of SWTOR, but as I expected, they quickly recovered, and I believe the recovery may even become a new high in the next few months.

It all depends of course how they will handle EVE Online, and if they will continue to do it right. If they keep improving the spaceship game as they are doing since the Incarna debacle and improve Incarna sandbox style instead of with microtransactions I think they have large potential. I think they realised by now they are not the dinosaur of the industry, even if they get rid of microtransactions, but they are the turtle of the industry, slowly moving forward but outliving all others. I still have quite a bit of reservations on the implementation of Dust, but we will tackle that when we get there.

I have also added EVE Online Global and China AA ( Active Accounts ), this includes the Global server Tranquility, the China server Serenity and the trial accounts. This way you get an idea of how many people are playing EVE Online around the globe, but by keeping the EVE Online Global SS ( Subscriptions ) listed separatly, we still have a view on the health of EVE Online on the main Tranquility server. As always, SS is more important than AA here at MMOData.net, but having them both is even better.

About Star Wars The Old Republic

It is clear their active players are dropping quite a bit, and this is without a doubt translated into their subscription number.

My opinion is that SWTOR has a good base game with enough quality content for a newly released game and at the same time it was released quite polished. The problem is that you burn thru the content too fast because it is just too easy, couple this with a light endgame and a thin social fabric and players reach the point of leaving the game rather sooner than later.

To elaborate on this further, when you level out of an area before you have done all the content, you either have to skip it, or fight green/gray mobs. If you at the same time want to do all the flashpoints and space missions a few times, then you are definitely fighting gray mobs and there is no longer any challenge.

So I bet most of the players that stopped playing just skipped the content and went to the endgame pretty fast. Too bad that the endgame is quite light, which is understandable for a newly released MMORPG, but when the MMORPG is so easy it becomes a serious handicap.

Add to this that the social fabric is quite thin because of the heavy use of instancing, quick travel, light guild features, redundancy of crafting and so on, and it becomes clear that there is little to keep the players from leaving.

At this rate I don't see EA Bioware putting out enough content to keep the players satisfied, they just can't keep up. It is a mystery to me why they made the content so easy, give out a good chunk less XP and you would have a different situation. I mean the content is there, why force players to skip it?

The way I see it is that you should be able to do all of the regular content and then a combination of flashpoints, bonus series and space missions before leveling out of an area.