Guild Wars 2

Take a look here.

For those saying, “LOL, not everyone who plays GW2 uses Xfire”, please read here.

I’m more interested in the curve seen in the graphic than in the absolute numbers themselves. We can clearly see that the game had been slowly losing players over time, with player spikes on weekends and during the two events.

Recently, though, the number of played hours suffered an abrupt fall. This is the first time GW2 falls bellow rank 5, too.

Why do you people think this has happened?

Here are some options, for the sake of the argument (but keep in mind this is not a poll):

1. Because of Ascended gear. ArenaNet has alienated its most loyal fanbase by adding a gear treadmill, and so a significant number of players is simply playing less.

2. Because Ascended gear is not enough. The MMO players who make the core of any MMO need strong vertical progression, and Ascended gear, limited to a few trinkets and barely more powerful than exotics, is not progression enough for them.

3. It doesn’t have anything to do with ascended gear, most people don’t care. The issue is that the game has too many unresolved bugs, such as all the dungeon bugs, all the trait bugs, and etc.

4. It doesn’t have anything to do with ascended gear, most people don’t care. The issue is that GW2 has too many base issues – ArenaNet was wrong in making the game so different from WoW. The game needs a more traditional combat system, the holy trinity, raids, mounts, duels and etc to keep real MMO players engaged.

5. It doesn’t have anything to do with ascended gear, most people don’t care. The issue is that GW2 has too many basic issues – ArenaNet was wrong in making the game so different from GW1. The game needs more skills, more flexibility in making a skill bar, heroes and henchmen, more instanced content, more content like the GW1 missions, and so on, to catter to GW1 players.

6. It’s mostly because PvP is a mess, and since endgame is PvP, people are leaving.

7. It’s mostly because balance is a mess. Too many underpowered professions/traits/skills with a few overpowered professions/traits/skills are making people leave the game.

8. Actually, there’s nothing wrong. This fall in the number of players is common in any game a few months after release. GW2 only fell to 6° place because Assassin’s Creed has just been released and took the 5° slot. There are still a lot of people in-game.

9. Other?

Discuss.

The trouble is the graph shows weekly numbers being flat all Nov, with a drop on Thanksgiving.

On the one hand xfire mostly represents Asian teens. On the other hand, people who get data from companies (e.g. mmodata.net) and compare to xfire show it’s at least correlated with reality.

9 If Mulch is right then its because- Anet totally dised the Asian And oceanic Player base in the last event and most of them have said to hell with it if they are going to be treated like that we will go play boarderlands 2 lol

A combination of different things:
- Pandas
- every MMO/game loses players after the first few month
- the change in what some of us though Arena Net’s philosophy was (ascended gear, fotm, grind, …)
- the timing of one time events just sucks for players from certain regions
- some people realized that their really is no typical end game in GW2
- even orbs were a problem in WvW without them it degraded, there is no incentive to build up a keep and hold it as long as possible, now WvW is more about the karma train than ever
- there are still huge balancing issues in s/tPvP
- also there is no Holy Trinity there is a huge power gap between the professions, some of them are very helpful in dungeons while others don’t add much

Erasculio.2914:

Take a look here.

For those saying, “LOL, not everyone who plays GW2 uses Xfire”, please read here.

Lol, statistics fail. Players who use Xfire are not remotely a representative sample; they’re heavy gamers, likely with a long game queue, exposed to a lot of media about upcoming games. They’re early adopters and early leavers; they play a lot of hours a week; they are likely to move games to follow their friends; they are likely to build social groups based on competition rather than on socialisation.

In short, you’re saying, “Oh noes, compared to launch day, there are significantly less early adopters online.” Which is… well, what did you expect was going to happen? For people who play 20+ games a year to suddenly get down on one knee and make a monogamous commitment to Guild Wars 2?

It’s a great game, but… seriously.

User of Xfire for several years here. This month I had not been playing as much GW2 due to other games with new releases and steam sales and such. As well as some rl stuff.

HOMAHGAWD GW2 IS DYINGGGG!!!!

Also, isn’t that graph showing # of hours played since it is currently 10,000+ and below the graph it says # of players 3,683.

It also says hours per day averages 11.770. If this graph truly is showing the number of hours that doesn’t mean less players it could just mean people have decided to start sleeping more and not play more than 11 hours a day.

Erasculio.2914:

Take a look here.

For those saying, “LOL, not everyone who plays GW2 uses Xfire”, please read here.

In that wiki you linked (lol) – did you read the part about what an unbiased sample is? An Xfire sample does not fit those criteria.

It’s possible it has nothing to do with Guild Wars 2 itself. Planetside 2 just came out recently and you have SWTOR going free to play. You’ve also got Black Ops 2 and Halo 4 that most likely will draw attention away from Guild Wars 2. I bet even WoW is losing playing time and possibly subscribers at this moment.

zeromius.1604:

It’s possible it has nothing to do with Guild Wars 2 itself. Planetside 2 just came out recently and you have SWTOR going free to play. You’ve also got Black Ops 2 and Halo 4 that most likely will draw attention away from Guild Wars 2. I bet even WoW is losing playing time and possibly subscribers at this moment.

Judging by the sales figures on Mists of Pandaria I’d say WoW is absolutely haemorrhaging players. They lost a quarter of their subscriber base between Cataclysm and Mists, and latest figures suggest they’ve only gained a 10% bump back up on the back of Mists. They’re definitely on the downhill slide.

That said, they’re starting from a ridiculously huge player base, though. They could lose 95% of their player base and still be profitable (although probably not employ quite so many people). And the decline’s going to be asymptotic – that last couple of million subscribers are going to be there for more than a decade to come, much like the long tail on Everquest, only bigger.

In regards to the OP, I would say everything you listed plays a factor. Some left because they don’t like ascended, some left because of bugs, some left because of balance etc.