NOW = 1.7 Million Active Subscribers | 3 Months from now = Guess What

my guess, 600k

not really, just wondering what ToR has to offer in terms of high level pvp? I hit cap and was pretty underwhelmed with a grand total of 3 players on Ilum at 10 pm server time last night. Perhaps all the pvp fans have already unsubbed, in which your statement would remain true.

GW2 certainly offers more than that for us large-scale pvp fans. no?

Ilum was showcased in a lot of the ToR hype/build up vids... an entire pvp planet? yes please. 3 months into release and it's still a buggy PoS with nobody playing it?

You clearly aren't press, so you weren't in the closed press beta. If so, man up and post the link to your website/press release, as I'd be interested to read your feedback (and give your site hits).

If you stopped by and played for 20 minutes at GamesCom or something, then lol.

that's simple a lie, gw2 is not even in closed beta yet, it was only a few days ago they invited applications for their closed beta for 48 hours and had over 1 million applications.

I can't give you that information... I had to sign a NDA to play.

I estimate 300k subs atm (that's a generous guess), and I think the game will be done, if they don't do something drastic in the next 6 months, by the end of the year.

Skipped to the end and read this which makes your entire post worthless. There's well over a million current subscribers. That's a fact.

Just cant believe how many people post that WRONG info that its for the first "free" month.

Prediction: ......1.5 million.

Doesnt seem to be bleeding subscriptions as badly as other new mmo and I just (cheated) read that its gone past 2mil box sales.

Anyways, here is the link to the results of the study - whole bunch of excel charts: http://dulfy.net/2012/02/24/some-num...swtor-servers/

Some interesting info: I estimated around 71646 concurrent players on 79 PVE/RP servers – with 35686 concurrent players on 46 PVE East Coast servers, 24817 concurrent players on 24 PVE-West Coast servers and 11142 concurrent players on 9 RP servers.

In terms of overall estimated fraction balance – 39395 concurrent Imperial players and 32250 concurrent Republic players, a Imperial/Republic Ratio of 1.22.

That's funny. The rest of the press was able to upload videos and blog about their experiences. Guess you got the short end of the stick.

I've been seeing people reference websites like torstatus and mmo junkies when attempting to argue server population points.

I thought I would make an independent post - without an argument on whether pop is actually rising or falling, in an attempt to explain them.

I have been associated with websites in the past that monitored server population(not currently with any of the ones I'll be mentioning and I am compelled to not post the ones I worked with in the past)

I am actually an economist by trade with a background in accounting - many of these websites consult with us so they can better understand the information they receive as well as to better educate those who visit their websites.

I will try to be as simple as possible.

Here is a link to MMO Junkise Server Status website
http://www.mmojunkies.net/index.phpa...ist&game=swtor

It appears to show a drop in population. The reality is you can not determine actual population numbers from this chart. They explain why at the bottom of the page

Note: Values in y-axis DOES NOT represent player count but instead aggregated server-status. For more information about interpreting them and explanation on how they're acquired, please visit our FAQ page.

What This Means - the y axis of the chart is the axis that is on the left and rising - on their charts it rises in increments of 100(so 100...200..300 etc.). This is NOT a count of the number of people logged in to SWTOR. this is a numerical representation of the aggregate server status. This means MMO Junkie has assigned a number value to each server status(example light = 1, medium = 2, heavy = 3) They track what each status of each server is, combined them, and come up with a total number. They then present this info on a graph, over time.

I will not go into the faq sections of each website which deal with this but I will explain, hopefully succinctly, why we can not rely on this information alone to determine server population.

Stephen Reid, a senior community manager had this to say about server population back in December:

"We’re monitoring all of our servers around the clock, and we’re raising server population caps where required. However, to ensure our long-term goals of server stability and healthy populations, we do not want to raise population caps too rapidly. We want incoming players to populate lower population servers. At the same time, higher population servers will not be ‘locked’ because we want to allow people to join a server to play with their friends if they wish to.”

The key to this is the raising of server limits. There are currently several threads on this forum that have people discussing where the population cut-off for very light/light/medium/heavy/very heavy are. It seems many people have seen the cut-off for the same status at different numbers - so one person says there was 500 ppl on and it was medium while another says there was 500 but it was still light on their server etc.

This is important when it comes to the graphs for this reason:

Server A - at launch
light 0-500
medium 501-1000
heavy 1001+

It is a popular server with long queues so Bioware determines it needs to increase the server cap. We don't know how it effects it at this point but the assumption is that the above chart would then change to look something like this:

light 0-750
medium 751-1250
heavy 1251+

With the addition of new players lets say the population levels out around 1100 players at peak. The MMO Junkie chart in December would have shown that as heavy, assinging the number value of 3 to that server. Now it would show as medium, assigning a number value of 2. This would mean the chart for this server would drop by a fairly large amount(since if at off-peak they have say 5-600 people, beforei t would have been medium-2, and now it's light -1)

The chart drop would actually correspond in this scenario with a population RISE.

Conclusion

We do not know what sub #/population # are right now. There are to many variables. Without a doubt some servers will increase in population and some will drop.

I hope I was able to demonstrate though that using these particular tools to chart actual population numbers would be incorrect and can in fact lead to wrong information.

The only way they could be valid as a defenitive tool for population growth/decline is if we knew for a fact that the very light/light/medium/heavy/very heavy numbers in fact never changed regardless of population cap changes. We also don't know if Bioware can/does individually change those numbers for their on internal purposes. What if they lowered the cap on other servers for instance, then the graph would go up but population might be dropping? We just don't know based on the information these charts give us.

The conclusions just aren't true though.


You can't tell exact populations with that system, but you can still see over all population trends with it.

And from the trends extrapolate that into over all subs, at least in correlation, if not absolute terms.




Its almost impossible for subs to be going up long term IF server status is going down long term (unless an MMO company is constantly changing the server status levels), because that would be on par with inventing a perpetual motion machine (which I'm sure game companies would want to do in both cases if it were possible, of course ).

So saying that because you can't tell exact numbers therefore you can't tell anything is just patently false.