It's startling how fast game activity is falling

[Northy]

I stopped WoWing few weeks after MoP when I realized they had no desire to make my Elemental Shaman PvP viable. I don't put up with ineptitude so I'll wait til the next expansion when they get a buff (ya right! lol!). But that's what I said for this expansion so whatever...I'm just wasting my time.

[braelin]

Dude, if you have a random sample, the size needed to reach a given level of statistical significance is (for large N) independent of the population size. That's why presidential polls have samples of just a few hundred voters, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people.

Bias in the sample is the concern, not its size. Its size is more than adequate.

While small random samples can be and are used to represent larger populations, they have to actually be as close to random as is possible. People that use X-Fire are not a random sample. As such, using that measurement is only representative of the subset of people that use X-Fire. If the mod you mentioned actually does look at an entire faction on a given server, that has a better chance of being more representative of the larger population.

The issue I have is that your sample size of two weeks is far too small to make any guess as to a trend. Your example of Presidential polls is also subject to this fact. Those numbers change on a daily basis; it's the same with unemployment numbers. When you compare one number from an earlier point in time to a "current" number, that's not a trend. What happened during all that time between those two points? You have to look at all of that data in order to formulate a trend.

There are many external factors that could have come in to play that account for the decrease in hours logged by X-Fire. Maybe there was extended maintenance that week or a large number of folks had connectivity issues with WoW and resulted in them playing less. Maybe they used another method of opening WoW than X-Fire. Or maybe an inept/disgruntled DBA at X-Fire deleted data.

TL;DR: You need a larger data set and to account for external factors.

EDIT: Punctuation.

[Osmeric]

The issue I have is that your sample size of two weeks is far too small to make any guess as to a trend.

Wait... two weeks? Where do you get that? XFire numbers (as recorded by The Nosy Gamer blog) are weekly extending back over most of 2012. And it's been months since MoP hit.

---------- Post added 2012-12-06 at 05:29 PM ----------

That is one big strawman if I ever saw one.

So, you're claiming you're immune to confirmation bias? Gosh.

[Lyrax]

The problem with the expansion, I think, was not that there was nothing to do, but that there was not enough worth doing.

This is just ridiculous. You can't gear up/do raids without doing the dailies. The whole point of an MMO is gearing your character/making them better :\. If its not worth doing that then ur playing the wrong game. If you dnt like wuts happened in WoW then just quit, the game won't be going anywhere though

[Osmeric]

This is just ridiculous. You can't gear up/do raids without doing the dailies.

This is wrong. You can gear up just fine for raiding by just doing heroic 5 mans.

Also, you are assuming raids are worth doing. LFR is, for me, only marginally fun. Normal/heroic mode raids are only being run by a small minority of players. For everyone else, they aren't worth doing.

[smegmage]

Hate all these "why do you care" responses. I care because a dwindling consistent player base adversely affects quality of raiding and gameplay in general IMO.

Im gonna be that guy, tbc was the peak of WoW. In Vanilla there was no pug raiding, and if there were it was solid raiders squeezing in a raid during the holidays, or doing alt zg/aq20 runs. You required to be in a guild to see any sort of raiding. This built a great sense of community, with competition amongst guilds. This guild requirement meant you needed to stick with one guild for a long time, adding to the raiding community once again. I knew hundreds of raiders, and dozens amongst various guilds by name as we interacted for years throughout vanilla/tbc. This ended with Wrath.

Casual raising became more common, you no longer needed to be in a guild to see progress with your character. Gear came easier, people got less personal and the experience worsened IMO. It was no longer groups of guilds who knew each other for years, it was guild hoppers, xfers and constantly changing raids thanks to pugs.

So that's it for me, a dwindling population ruins raiding for me. I play the game for myself yes, but I prefer if other people are playing too. Would you have fun on a server with only 10/25 people? It'd be boring as hell! I much prefer having 200 people who know each other somewhat well than 400 casuals who hop around going from group to group, or even worse....lfr. The nail in the coffin to community.

[braelin]

Wait... two weeks? Where do you get that? XFire numbers (as recorded by The Nosy Gamer blog) are weekly extending back over most of 2012. And it's been months since MoP hit.

Your OP had two weeks worth of data. You did go on to say that the time between also showed decline. However, without verifying that (honestly, who is going to?), I took the two data points in your OP as your evidence. I did take a glance and saw some decline. It looked as though there may have been a least a week or two where the numbers went up from the previous, but their format was not really amenable. Maybe there are filtering options, I didn't look in-depth enough to see.

That being said, the data is still only representative of X-Fire users. Without analysis to show that their stats correlate to trend within the entire community, they're really worth a grain of salt. They are interesting none-the-less.

You may have done due diligence in compiling and assessing the data; I have no idea. What was presented, however, was not an indication of that.

[Osmeric]

Your OP had two weeks worth of data. You did go on to say that the time between also showed decline. However, without verifying that (honestly, who is going to?), .

Ah, so you were too lazy to go to the reference I gave (with a helpful link you could click, no less), but instead decided to reach a conclusion that deliberately ignored the additional data you knew existed. At least you later did look at it.

[braelin]

Ah, so you were too lazy to go to the reference I gave (with a helpful link you could click, no less), but instead decided to reach a conclusion that deliberately ignored the additional data you knew existed. At least you later did look at it.

I don't take offense or even disagree; but why resort to name calling? It's intriguing that you only responded to that snippet.

[Northy]

Is Elder Scrolls Online out yet?

[mvaliz]

Is Elder Scrolls Online out yet?

Can't be... we haven't had the forums filled with "ES:O is going to kill WoW" threads yet.

Every MMO today has to produce that phase before qualifying for release. I think it's written down there somewhere in the MMO-Geneva convention. :P

[Antipathy]

Ah, so you were too lazy to go to the reference I gave (with a helpful link you could click, no less), but instead decided to reach a conclusion that deliberately ignored the additional data you knew existed. At least you later did look at it.

Your patience throughout this thread has almost been saint like. just wanted to pop in and say that.

Especially in dealing with all the "this is not how statistics work" posts. you keep having to explain that over and over and over and over.

I would recommend you edit your first post clarifying how sampling works.

[Deleted]

Ah, so you were too lazy to go to the reference I gave (with a helpful link you could click, no less), but instead decided to reach a conclusion that deliberately ignored the additional data you knew existed. At least you later did look at it.

This is what makes me stop bothering and give up writing an compressed tutorial
how warcraftsrealms.com statistics and the Cencus add-on work, what they do
and don't, which could be added into the OP, to combat the complete ill knowledge
about the matter and stop the many unnecessary and pointless replies.

I doubt the people who come up with these replies would even bother to read it
and suspect they would even ignore it and say the same wrong things anyway.

[Osmeric]

Well, it is a subject that comes up again and again and again. You now cling to the data from XFire net. What happens if Blizzard confirms 10 million subs in the next Quarterly report? I suppose then we will have the standard replies of [...]

Or, more mundanely, we'll have evidence that "activity" and "subscriptions" aren't necessarily tied together.

BTW, if there is a sub loss, I don't expect it to be anywhere close to the apparent activity decline. Back after the Cata release, it appears WCR activity declined in percentage terms much more than subs went down, at least initially.

[Destruktion]

This is wrong. You can gear up just fine for raiding by just doing heroic 5 mans.

Also, you are assuming raids are worth doing. LFR is, for me, only marginally fun. Normal/heroic mode raids are only being run by a small minority of players. For everyone else, they aren't worth doing.

How ironic is it now that Blizzard has found a way to cater to every player demographic in a meaningful way these activities "aren't worth doing." That's a matter of opinion of course, but it goes to show how even if WoW is fuller and more vibrant than ever before people will still complain.

[Deleted]

Or, more mundanely, we'll have evidence that "activity" and "subscriptions" aren't necessarily tied together.

BTW, if there is a sub loss, I don't expect it to be anywhere close to the apparent activity decline. Back after the Cata release, it appears WCR activity declined in percentage terms much more than subs went down, at least initially.

Sir! "Local activity" and "global subscriptions"!

But we don't want to get into even further details making their heads explode.

[Osmeric]

How ironic is it now that Blizzard has found a way to cater to every player demographic in a meaningful way these activities "aren't worth doing." That's a matter of opinion of course, but it goes to show how even if WoW is fuller and more vibrant than ever before people will still complain.

I don't think anyone is obligated to feel Blizzard's efforts are successful, just because they are part of an audience Blzzard is ostensibly intending to cater to.

Sir! "Local activity" and "global subscriptions"!

Point granted.

The sub decline this time, if it occurs, will also be with China having gotten the expansion in synchrony with everyone else (a first). Who knows what that will do?

[Zoneseek]

Is Elder Scrolls Online out yet?

I hope elder scrolls online isn't pushing back the next elder scrolls offline title. I would much rather TEV 6 then yet another mmo with no pause button...

[SamR]

Looks to me like the WCR chart shows activity higher than at any time in the last year of Cata. So not sure why anyone would predict a sub loss based on the "evidence" presented in this thread.

[Belize]

I hope elder scrolls online isn't pushing back the next elder scrolls offline title. I would much rather TEV 6 then yet another mmo with no pause button...

Not the same company making the games. Bethesda makes the "offline" TES and Zenimax is making TES:Oline.