Guild Wars 2

So i just seen this, seems like gw2 player base has been dropping for some time now.
I have to say, i myself stopped playing a while ago. Gw2 was my favorite game and LS2 totaly killed it for me. Anet went in the wrong direction with LS2. It gave me zero reason to play more than 4 hours every 2-4weeks. Unlike LS1, were i would spend every day farming and grinding in LS1.
Its sad for me not to play this game, im a preorder 3 day before launch player, and i so want to play Gw2. I really hope that the new dlc will change the current setup, but if its anything like LS2 then i guess ill wait another year or two.

http://massivelyop.com/2015/07/02/world-of-tanks-swtor-rocketed-up-the-raptr-chart-in-may/

Because everyone uses Raptr.

What is Raptr and what makes them a reliable source?

Considering Anet have never released data on player numbers (unless you count 1 chat posted 2 years ago) I doubt they’re getting it from them, or NCSoft, and without that I can’t see how they could have reliable data.

The rankings are based off of Raptr’s customer base who use their service. It’s not really accurate.

someone who did enjoy the notorious season 1 more than season 2 because of mindless grind is not a reliable source for complaints whatsoever

From a post on that site:

sray155 gold patronJul 2, 2015
“The thing to keep in mind about Raptr is that it is grossly inaccurate, and in no way reflective of what people are playing. This chart shows Counterstrike having more players than DOTA2 by a reasonably significant margin: if you look at the Steam stats (Steam being required for both games) you’d see that twice as many people are playing DOTA2 at any given moment.

Raptr’s stats are based entirely upon its install base, which is mostly competitive gamers (it’s used for tracking comparative stats, mostly in competitive play, amongst its users); aka not the majority of MMORPG players. Used as a trend tracking tool, it can be helpful, but only if used as supplemental to other data."

Ha. I never turn my Raptr on when playing GW2. Not even sure it’s still installed. That’s only this month, anyway. I’m sure it will ‘rocket up the charts’ when HoT launches.

The forums are likely just as accurate. One portion of the forum-users state the game is dead, they see no one in the maps; the other portion states the game population is robust, they see players everywhere they go!

Edit: And then there’s the hyperbole, of course.

I see a lot of players around in GW2 /shrug while when I logged into SW:TOR the other day I did not see anyone for 5 hours. (high pop server) so I doubt the accuracy of those numbers

First of all, that’s old.

http://massivelyop.com/2015/07/29/ffxiv-swtor-and-guild-wars-2-fall-in-raptrs-june-rankings/

Second of all, who are these guys, I’ve never heard of them or their service. And if there’s a lot of people like me, that’s why GW2 isn’t a huge deal there.

I don’t use this application either, but I do find the sampling indicative of the current population and interest in the game as a whole.

The second chart: http://massivelyop.com/2015/07/29/ffxiv-swtor-and-guild-wars-2-fall-in-raptrs-june-rankings/ bears that out.

Regardless, this shouldn’t be a shock to anyone paying attention.

vladracul.6798:

someone who did enjoy the notorious season 1 more than season 2 because of mindless grind is not a reliable source for complaints whatsoever

Season one at least gave us something new every 2 weeks, while season 2 were
mainly long breaks followed by the next long break, and else there was only
farming SW.

Do people run that app to do gaming videos for YT channels? Because I never felt all that motivated to watch YT videos about GW2 other than the occasional JP hop through or Dulfy video about new gem store stuff.

Although I am getting into Guild Gab which is 3-5 talking heads with almost no game footage talking about this week’s GW2 news.

The population drop, if the evidence provided is to be believed, has nothing to do with either Seasons One or Two, nor anything as pedestrian as ‘grinding’ for loot or achievements.

The population drop has everything to do with the players having nothing to do in the game right now. And, unfortunately for ANet, other games are now drawing that population with shiny new carrots.

Keep in mind, the pool of players is pretty much the same. It doesn’t take a chart or rocket science to understand that if players have nothing to do or chase in one game, they’ll find another game to occupy their time.

The multiple threads over this past month begging for special or seasonal events again bear this out.

It’s accurate for the people using Raptr, and that’s also a large number of AMD card users since raptr comes bundled with CCC. It may not be a wide, accurate measurement. But a large drop in players on somthing small like raptr is still a drop in players, even if more are being funneled in elseware such as with HoT hype =P Either way take it at a low margin.

Well we haven’t got any events for 6-7 months now,not sure how many player will return when expansion is finally ready but they lost a lot that found another mmos to play…

Alpha Z E R O.8504:

So i just seen this, seems like gw2 player base has been dropping for some time now.
I have to say, i myself stopped playing a while ago. Gw2 was my favorite game and LS2 totaly killed it for me. Anet went in the wrong direction with LS2. It gave me zero reason to play more than 4 hours every 2-4weeks. Unlike LS1, were i would spend every day farming and grinding in LS1.
Its sad for me not to play this game, im a preorder 3 day before launch player, and i so want to play Gw2. I really hope that the new dlc will change the current setup, but if its anything like LS2 then i guess ill wait another year or two.

http://massivelyop.com/2015/07/02/world-of-tanks-swtor-rocketed-up-the-raptr-chart-in-may/

1. This raptr thingy ….. never even heard of it and I am not exactly a casual, have been playing MMORPGs pretty much since the genre started.

2. This game is a couple years old now, naturally it loses customers.

3. A net dropped the ball on WvW where the tight knit servers wide community was at. Even if anyone is just a pve 1 spammer they are affected because it all trickles down to people playing. And in MMORPGs communities are what keeps players longterm. No amount of casual short term replacements can ever make up for the losses of longterm loyal customers. they made a business error here focusing too much on the short term while completely neglecting their longterm. The PvE guilds can’t even come remotely close on this aspect, and the spvp guilds are too small and have little to no effect here. PvX guilds with various amounts of focus on WvW is where it was at. Note the word “was”. now its nowhere.

4. Game is stale. Stale WvW, stale dungeons, stale zerker meta even with recent condi changes (see dungeons LFG, 80s zerker only….) just overall stale.

5. Low quality sub par content. LS doesnt hold jack to games like Witcher 3, or DAI on the story front, and if all anyone does is play for LS they are missing the entire point of why play an MMORPG and become part of the above mentioned communities, without this, other players might as well be more NPCs or props, and you get better versions of those in single player RPGs nowadays. So LS is kinda pointless. In fact, if anyone reading this is playing solely for LS, they should really go pick up Witcher 3 instead of HoT and they will be absolutely amazed at what they’re missing out on.

WereDragon.6083:

But a large drop in players on somthing small like raptr is still a drop in players, even if more are being funneled in elseware

Not necessarily.

There is the view that many are missing that players are simply stopping using Raptr because it is not satisfactory to them, and they are in no way leaving the game, simply ceasing to use Raptr.

Tongku.5326:

5. Low quality sub par content. LS doesnt hold jack to games like Witcher 3, or DAI on the story front, and if all anyone does is play for LS they are missing the entire point of why play an MMORPG and become part of the above mentioned communities, without this, other players might as well be more NPCs or props, and you get better versions of those in single player RPGs nowadays. So LS is kinda pointless. In fact, if anyone reading this is playing solely for LS, they should really go pick up Witcher 3 instead of HoT and they will be absolutely amazed at what they’re missing out on.

Interesting. Thank you. I’ll check Witcher 3 out.

Danikat.8537:

What is Raptr and what makes them a reliable source?

Considering Anet have never released data on player numbers (unless you count 1 chat posted 2 years ago) I doubt they’re getting it from them, or NCSoft, and without that I can’t see how they could have reliable data.

Raptr is an ailing gaming social media and tuning app. It is not a reliable source, it’s usership is too low to gain any reliable information from it. It’s only tracking hundreds to thousands at best for each game.

Most mmos people take a break before an expansion comes out, since there’s never much to do.

Raptr is actually not inacurate at all, If you take the twitch views, raptr, Realted YouTube video views and the numbers WoW(6mil), Dota(10Mil), CS:GO(8mil), LoL(30mil), FFXIV you can make a very good estimate of how well a game is doing, and is clear that gw2 the last months has been actually dropping. i know that because i noticed it my self recently.

People use Raptr? I mean I heard of it but it’s not commonly used in Guild Wars 2 as far as I can tell. I’ve never heard of anyone using it. Hardly a reliable source of data to determine actual popularity/population numbers in comparison to other games. People use other things like Teamspeak, Skype, Steam, Ventrilo or Mumble. Literally never heard of anyone saying anything about Raptr unless it’s a coincidence but I doubt it.

Three year old game with no expansion yet and no real content in months drops in the TOP 20 games, not MMO games, and you’re thinking it’s doing bad? hahahahahah

I don’t know why people complain about story in GW2 this is one of the MMOs with better story out there. There is actually immersion on it, other MMOs barely have a story at all.

coso.9173:

I don’t know why people complain about story in GW2 this is one of the MMOs with better story out there. There is actually immersion on it, other MMOs barely have a story at all.

Yeah like Archeages ‘story’ -shudders-

I also play Neverwinter. it being a DnD game you would think story is an important part of it, but sadly it really isn’t.
in the last expansion we got 4 new areas (3 of them reused from before and an actual new one) and in those new areas, there isn’t even a proper questline, there are just some “vigilante” quests that are just “kill 4 cats” and stuff without any related story and when you do 16 of them you go to the next hub.
It’s really really tedious, and compared to that, I feel like GW2 has a really rich and great story.

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after. The actual data that article uses is known to be inaccurate. So what we are left with is:

“There are fewer GW2 players now thakittenx months after launch. We have no idea how many fewer or how that compares to the industry averages. In short, we can report nothing other than what people could figure out on their own, using tea leaves or a dart board.”

GW2 hasn’t had any updates for some time now. It’s not unreasonable to expect a drop in players until something happens to bring people back. We will see gw2 jump right back into the top 20 with the release of HoT.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

Fernling.1729:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

WoW has lost 44% of its subscribers in the last year and is down to 5.6 million. It’s close to 2006 numbers.

WoW subscriber base hits all time low since 2006

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Fernling.1729:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

WoW has lost 44% of its subscribers in the last year and is down to 5.6 million. It’s close to 2006 numbers.

WoW subscriber base hits all time low since 2006

What are you even talking about? Read what I quoted for crying out loud. Nothing was ever said about WoW having 5.6 million subscribers after being live for almost 11 years.
If you want to get down to it, WoW still has more players than it did 6 months after release. It would fit the criteria whether it was 3,4,5, or even 10 years.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

WoW had more players 3 years after launch than they did at 6 months.

Fernling.1729:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

It may not have held true for WoW back then, when it was one of the only games on the block. But we’re not really talking about then. We’re talking about now. How many subscribers has WoW lost in the last year? I bet it’s more people than are playing Guild Wars 2 currently.

League of Legends is a game that’s free to download and play with no real pay to win aspect, in a field with far less competition. When comparing games to games, you should compare like genres, anyway, but even if you don’t, League of Legends is a very very rare exception as is WoW.

It’s so easy to point to exceptions and try to make them rules. You’re talking about two of the most successful games of all time. Try this instead.

Make a list of every single game that has come out from WoW and LoL’s time and figure out a percentage of games that this is true for.

You’ll find it’s not just an overwhelming majority, but it’s a staggering overwhelming majority.

tldr; Pointing to two extraordinary exceptions doesn’t invalidate a post you’re responding to.

Fernling.1729:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Fernling.1729:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

WoW has lost 44% of its subscribers in the last year and is down to 5.6 million. It’s close to 2006 numbers.

WoW subscriber base hits all time low since 2006

What are you even talking about? Read what I quoted for crying out loud. Nothing was ever said about WoW having 5.6 million subscribers after being live for almost 11 years.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

WoW had more players 3 years after launch than they did at 6 months.

True. But I was also pointing out the huge loss in subscribers, which is happening about the same time as Guild Wars 2’s alleged loss in numbers that the op was referring too. Less than a year ago wow had about 10 million subscribers. In just these few months they lost 44% of their players, right after releasing a new expansion. Maybe the cause is different, but it shows that this game isn’t unique in losing people at this period of time.

Yes, that article was also on Yahoo yesterday. Warcraft lost another million players within the last few months or so. Regardless, it kind of proves the OP’s point.

Players are bored with the same formula and want something new. I’ll include myself in that equation. My wife and I did our dailies and logged out within ten minutes. She went to check out Path of the Exile.

I tried and researched Drakensang and Witcher 3. Heck, it might be time to finally play GTA5.

Raptr tells you nothing. It used to have users, because they had good giveaway promotions, but it’s new Raptr Point system is terrible and it has lost many users as a result. The only thing keeping people using it at all is that it’s included as bloatware with AMD drivers, and if they’re leaving GW2, well, we already know they make bad decisions…
;)
Seriously though, Raptr is dying off because they decided to stop giving cool stuff away. Any interesting promotions they have these days tend to be so far out of reach for average users that nobody can get them, and most people didn’t need a “Social Network for Gaming” to begin with. I know I didn’t, I just wanted cool free gear for Warframe and Blacklight: Retribution, etc.

Vayne.8563:

Fernling.1729:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

tldr; Pointing to two extraordinary exceptions doesn’t invalidate a post you’re responding to.

I would have to disagree when the post I respond to says “all games”. All it would take is one exception to invalidate his entire post. If he would have said most or almost all I would have read it and nodded my head in agreement.

I don’t see anything abnormal when it comes to the population in GW2. There hasn’t been content updates in awhile now. Once the expansion is released those numbers will jump right back up. Just like WoW, when the expansion releases the numbers will jump right back up. Maybe lower than before or even higher, who knows.
This is the exact same thing that happens with a lot of mmos right before an expansion release. I believe it’s because little to no content is released where the developers are all working on getting the expansion together.

Fernling.1729:

Vayne.8563:

Fernling.1729:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

tldr; Pointing to two extraordinary exceptions doesn’t invalidate a post you’re responding to.

I would have to disagree when the post I respond to says “all games”. All it would take is one exception to invalidate his entire post. If he would have said most or almost all I would have read it and nodded my head in agreement.

I don’t see anything abnormal when it comes to the population in GW2. There hasn’t been content updates in awhile now. Once the expansion is released those numbers will jump right back up. Just like WoW, when the expansion releases the numbers will jump right back up. Maybe lower than before or even higher, who knows.
This is the exact same thing that happens with a lot of mmos right before an expansion release. I believe it’s because little to no content is released where the developers are all working on getting the expansion together.

You can disagree all you want. So we can change all to almost every single game, which would then be true and would then substantively say the same thing. There are some facts here which are facts.

There is NO MMORPG in the top 20 that hasn’t had an expansion in the last year. None. Zero.

Expansions keep people returning to games. So if Guild Wars 2 hasn’t had an expansion in 3 years and for all that time it was in the top 20, well, it’ hardly says anything about Guild Wars 2 directly. It doesn’t even mean less people are playing it’s simply that people who are playing are playing less time.

The gist of what was being said is that this is normal for almost all games. Congratulations for finding the exceptions.

Vayne.8563:

Fernling.1729:

Vayne.8563:

Fernling.1729:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

tldr; Pointing to two extraordinary exceptions doesn’t invalidate a post you’re responding to.

I would have to disagree when the post I respond to says “all games”. All it would take is one exception to invalidate his entire post. If he would have said most or almost all I would have read it and nodded my head in agreement.

I don’t see anything abnormal when it comes to the population in GW2. There hasn’t been content updates in awhile now. Once the expansion is released those numbers will jump right back up. Just like WoW, when the expansion releases the numbers will jump right back up. Maybe lower than before or even higher, who knows.
This is the exact same thing that happens with a lot of mmos right before an expansion release. I believe it’s because little to no content is released where the developers are all working on getting the expansion together.

You can disagree all you want. So we can change all to almost every single game, which would then be true and would then substantively say the same thing. There are some facts here which are facts.

There is NO MMORPG in the top 20 that hasn’t had an expansion in the last year. None. Zero.

Expansions keep people returning to games. So if Guild Wars 2 hasn’t had an expansion in 3 years and for all that time it was in the top 20, well, it’ hardly says anything about Guild Wars 2 directly. It doesn’t even mean less people are playing it’s simply that people who are playing are playing less time.

The gist of what was being said is that this is normal for almost all games. Congratulations for finding the exceptions.

I was just pointing out something that was factually false. It was a single sentence to correct someone’s mistake. The post right before that said the same thing you are saying now. Not sure what the big deal is when mentioning that some games have a higher population 3 years after launch than they did at 6 months.

Fernling.1729:

Vayne.8563:

Fernling.1729:

Vayne.8563:

Fernling.1729:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Games always have fewer players 3 years after launch than they do six months after.

Minecraft, WoW and LoL are just a few where this doesn’t hold true.

tldr; Pointing to two extraordinary exceptions doesn’t invalidate a post you’re responding to.

I would have to disagree when the post I respond to says “all games”. All it would take is one exception to invalidate his entire post. If he would have said most or almost all I would have read it and nodded my head in agreement.

I don’t see anything abnormal when it comes to the population in GW2. There hasn’t been content updates in awhile now. Once the expansion is released those numbers will jump right back up. Just like WoW, when the expansion releases the numbers will jump right back up. Maybe lower than before or even higher, who knows.
This is the exact same thing that happens with a lot of mmos right before an expansion release. I believe it’s because little to no content is released where the developers are all working on getting the expansion together.

You can disagree all you want. So we can change all to almost every single game, which would then be true and would then substantively say the same thing. There are some facts here which are facts.

There is NO MMORPG in the top 20 that hasn’t had an expansion in the last year. None. Zero.

Expansions keep people returning to games. So if Guild Wars 2 hasn’t had an expansion in 3 years and for all that time it was in the top 20, well, it’ hardly says anything about Guild Wars 2 directly. It doesn’t even mean less people are playing it’s simply that people who are playing are playing less time.

The gist of what was being said is that this is normal for almost all games. Congratulations for finding the exceptions.

I was just pointing out something that was factually false. It was a single sentence to correct someone’s mistake. The post right before that said the same thing you are saying now. Not sure what the big deal is when mentioning that some games have a higher population 3 years after launch than they did at 6 months.

You’re looking at the trees and ignoring the forest. There’s no big deal in pointing out a factual mistake. However, when you do that without agreeing with the principle of what’s being said, you’re showing support for the other side. It’s very much sounds like you’re contradicting the idea behind the post, instead of the specifics within the post.

You’re right in pointing out a factual discrepancy, but without supporting the idea of the post, you’re making it sound like the post was substantively wrong. It was right enough to carry that point and that needed, in my opinion, to be acknowledged.

It’s rare enough where it doesn’t really have bearing on the conversation, even if it was it was factually wrong.

Sealreth.1425:

I see a lot of players around in GW2 /shrug while when I logged into SW:TOR the other day I did not see anyone for 5 hours. (high pop server) so I doubt the accuracy of those numbers

That is about as reliable as these rankings unless SWTOR uses something like megaserver as well. With megaserver as long as there are enough people to fill one server per region it’ll look like the game is full of people.

Funny, I didn’t get raptr with the 15.7 drivers.

I don’t disagree that the active population dropped due to lack of any meaningful content update. But this weekend was a tale of whether you had beta access or not in terms of how busy the core world maps were.

such lists are really useless even if you factor out the unreliability of 3rd party sources like Raptr. How can you compare games like LoL, WoT and MMORPG. People often just play one MMORPG and other online games on the side, putting MOBAs into a list with MMORPG does not say anything about their success.

Also, remember the new WoW, GW2 whatever killer AA? Seems it did not even beat GW2 in that list (though of cause that is not reliable market info either).

May i point out this is the first post ever of the OP on the forum ? That’s a bait.

OMG !!!! GW2 is ded

19th game on Raptr still means there are loads of people playing…

I honestly don’t give a kitten how many people are playing. As long as there’s enough to keep the maps filled and events alive, i’m fine with it, and atm, there isn’t any problem with that, thanks to the megaservers.

I’m still having fun, that’s the important part for me.

The figures given in Raptr’s demographics are:

• Only relevant to their own users, and can’t be used to indicate any game’s popularity, since that is not the data being presented.

• When compared to known game populations (eg. Dota 2) is demonstrably wrong as an indicator of game populations.

Since when is a thirt party tool a reliable source for the whole playerbase. When installing new amd catalyst drivers i Always make sure that Raptr is not installed with it (checkbox of). I think many others do exactly the same with unnecessary 3th party programs polluting the pcs resources.

WereDragon.6083:

It’s accurate for the people using Raptr, and that’s also a large number of AMD card users since raptr comes bundled with CCC. It may not be a wide, accurate measurement. But a large drop in players on somthing small like raptr is still a drop in players, even if more are being funneled in elseware such as with HoT hype =P Either way take it at a low margin.

Except I have an AMD card and I didn’t think I’d ever heard of Raptr before.

After seeing other replies in this thread I realised I do recognise the name, but only as something I always uncheck the box for when updating CCC. Which to my mind puts it into the same category as the google toolbar and other bloatware which tries to sneak in with valid updates. I think I may have installed it once, realised it didn’t appear to do anything useful for me and uninstalled it.

But if I remember correctly it didn’t run automatically and certainly didn’t appear to track what I was playing automatically (if it did then I’m even happier I uninstalled it) so I don’t think the number of AMD card users is a good way to determine how many people use Raptr.

It’d be the subset of AMD users who actually take the time to use Raptr (I can’t imagine there would be many who would choose it over, or in addition to more popular programs like Steam) and choose to report what they’re playing regularly and play GW2.