EA shareholders meeting: over/under 300k subs?

The Asian pay model does not function the same as the NA/EU pay model in WoW. They do not buy $15 time cards which give them one month of game time nor do they pay $15 to access the game for one month. That is not how they work. The Asian subs SHOULD NOT be counted equivalent to NA/EU subs because neither the revenue generated by the player, nor the contribution to the community is the same.

Asian subs simply are not economically equivalent to NA/EU subs no matter how you slice it. They cost more to support and provide service to, they pay pennies on the dollar, and are far more likely to be legitimate players.

Its only moot if you have your head in the sand, someone in the west paying monthly and when there time runs out they cant play and are classed as inactive. If someone in the east puts monetry pay by the hour value on there game it is classed as active aslong as there is credit on the account and the bnet account is active.

tru there is alot low servers but 30+ highs and who knows im not counting lol mediums

swtor basicly got 11 servers and cant fill them

It's moot because that's how it is, boss. You're debating a system Blizzard has no control over. That's how online transactions are handled in other countries like those in the far east. There is absolutely no way around that unless you stop selling the game in those countries. That's why it's a moot point.

An active account is active, there's really no other way to put it. This is not groundbreaking science.

BTW just to clarify this statement. This does not mean 400k people cancelled their subs but that their subs dropped from 1.7 to 1.3 million.

People also are forgetting that half the population is playing the Beta for MoP, and also it usually gets a little inactive at the end of an expansion when the same content has been out for months. I mean hell that's normal, you see it here.

There are only TWO reasons a player should care at all about the number of subs and the direction those subs are going.

1. More subs = more money coming into the company which means more and bigger developments and content added. Subs affect the amount of content the developer will create and the rate at which that content is added.

2. Grouping opportunities. The more subs there are the more opportunities there will be for you as a member of the community.

Asian players do not bring nearly the revenue that NA/EU subs bring in. They do not pay a sub fee and the small fee they do pay is a fraction of the EU, on top of that the cost to support these players is more so the profit is smaller. These players also do not offer the same grouping opportunities as NA/EU players because they either are playing on servers that NA/EU does not or cannot have access to or they are not legitimate accounts, they belong to gold farmers and bots. By any metric, 1 Asian sub /= 1 NA/EU sub

Completely lying, eh?

1, There are six heavy EU servers RIGHT NOW. I checked. Out of 13(non-locked). That's almost half.
2, Even assuming you are right and the server is standard, all the new players are playing roughly in the same zone, give or take one. That means there well may be two or even three Nar Shadaas regardless of how heavy the total population is, because the players who joined at the same time(when free trial started) and are levelling at roughly the same pace will all be inside the same zone, forcing more instances.

I aint your boss cos i would have fired you by now. People are stating that wow has 10 mil active subscribers when in actual fact it has never had over 4.2 mil active subscribers at its peak, it has had 10 mil + active accounts not subscribers. It matters not how its payed for its the value presented via the value of the western market subscription locked into a set value for a set month with varying discounts for 1 month subs to an annual pass.


And with that i bid you all good night as im off to the pub to watch the olympics.

Sigh...I really think some people do not understand what "facts" are.

It's like a detective investigating a crime. They look for facts in order to point them in the right direction of a suspect. If they have a gun with fingerprints, motive and opportunity they can make a reasonable guess as to who the killer is. Do you think they give up just because their were no witnesses? You use the facts that are available to you.

And despite what you may think, it is in fact better than just picking up a random guy off the street and saying, "Well you are as likely as anyone else seeing as how nobody actually saw the killer!"

If you have a problem with the math, or the assumptions made, they have been discussed ad nauseum in the "Estimate of concurrent logins" thread. Go check it out.

Could all the assumptions be wrong? Oh sure, it could be (in particular the 10% figure for average population logged on at any time. If it were say 5% instead then you could double my 500k estimate to 1 million.) But at some point you have to look at the odds of it being wrong in the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence and choose which argument you wish to support.

I just want to reiterate that I have no agenda here. I want SWTOR to succeed. I want it to get better. I think the two go hand in hand.

[bows out of discussion]