SWTOR still bleeding players?

http://www.torstatus.net/shards/us/stats

Not sure how people still think this game is bleeding players. This game is stabilized. And IMO has been slowly growing.

IMO this is the best mmo on the market right now. And I'm glad to see it grow and develope. I think it has had a rough start but for the most part I like the frequent content updates and as llong as they dont sway too much towards play to win, I like the direction it's going.

You do know that counts the status of the servers, and it in no way shows the population. SWTOR has changed time and again what light, med, and high means. So it is really a bad way of saying the game has a lot of players.
But like I will say again, if you like the game, great, if not, great, but the game has lost a huge chunk of subs, and there is no way of knowing if it gaining any more or losing more. Unless they announce numbers again in a investor's call, nobody knows.

Whenever I login to game, I have more than enough (Sometimes a lot more than its supposed to be...) people playing the game and all servers at least on heavy population. That is enough for me

Yeah, same here. Loads of people around. Good enough for me too.

Even if its based on light med an high it would still show that it's not bleeding out players. Or else the weekly change would be negative.

Torstatus shows players, not subs. As far as those of us who take player censuses regularly can tell, BW has NOT changed the Light/Standard/Heavy/VHeavy/Full calculation any time since launch. There IS a calculable relationship between displayed load status and concurrent player population, but it is affected by what the players are doing - some kinds of gameplay, like warzones, seem to be "heavier" than others. The so called "mega servers" appear to work by continuing to accept players beyond the FULL point... but FULL itself is still reached at the same number.

Torstatus is actually an EXCELLENT way of tracking server populations, and the way we know this is that every time we go in and measure ourselves, the results match. The big change Torstatus itself made back in July was to stop including the "origin servers" in its calculation - the transfers had been open for some time - and just start averaging the "destination" servers. From July until now, the scale is constant and accurate.

We are neither losing nor gaining players at the moment overall, although Christmas is a bit of a black eye. Last year everyone had a SWTOR box under the tree, which is part of how they moved 2.5 million. This year nobody has it under the tree - instead they have some other game, and today they're probably playing it. Let's hope they come back soon!

If it seems anecdotally to you like there's more people in your cantina or fewer instances in Fleet or whatever, that's just local experience. Overall we are holding firm, or we were as of Sunday. If the game seems more crowded than it was in October, that's because F2P gave us a 40-45% peak player boost (yay!!). If it seems more crowded than it was in June, that's because of a 10-to-1 merge (belated bittersweet yay). If it seems emptier than ever, that's because you play APAC or Jung Ma.

Bear in mind that most of those players are on the starting planets. If I roll a new toon, there's 200+ players in whatever instance I'm in. If I log in to my lvl 45 toon, there's like 50 people in instance 1 and that's it. How many of these players are new to the game and BW hasn't made any money off of them as of yet. If they don't stick around (and it's looking like they aren't) then BW never makes any money off them.

So this is the new line from EA central? and you bought it? EA talking points enter the picture again.

1. it can't be EA

2. has to be the player

3. if not then the player's bank

4. if not something wrong with the way cards are handled.

Sound familiar...? sorta like the in game bugs... can't be the game, has to be the player, if not the player's computer, if not the player's ISP, etc. ad nausem.

How about this.. it is EA.... fix it.

The banks all disagree with EA's talking points.... wonder who to trust?

You really believe this?

Whenever there was a change in the meaning of "light,med.,etc" torstatus showed it by a dramatic change in the graph, i.e. when the final merger took place.

It had that change only 1x... all the rest showed a smooth curve. So the basis of your analysis seems a tad off.

They've changed the definition of light, medium, heavy at least 3 times since release (once soon after release, once after the first merges, and once for the merges into the "super" servers), and only once did they even hint what those words translated into in terms of actual numbers (the first time), and never have they been clearly defined. Torstatus is great at tracking server status, but it doesnt track population by any mathematical definition. You cant even really say it tracks trends without knowing when and if the definitions of the terms get changed - which, again, BW has never done.

So no, there's no way (for us) to tell short of anecdotal analysis. I can tell you that after the latest merge into super servers, during prime time I could see 3-4 fleets, with 250ish in most. Now I tend to see 2, with up to 250 players in the main and 100-150 in the 2nd, but that's one datapoint and fairly meaningless. You could also set up a bot that did a /who of various zones and levels, at various times of the day, and while that wouldnt give an accurate number, it would be useful in terms of tracking trends (but not definitive.) Combined with the graph from http://www.swtor.com/info/news/blog/20121130 which shows a fairly steady ~30% of fleet population usage by time, will give you the most accurate guess possible. i.e. if there's 500 people on your fleet, theres probably around 1500 on the server at that moment (on your side)