Well, I've never quite seen this before (EQ1 slow death watch)

[Iniquity]

Chalk it up as a sign of MMO death.  EverQuest's latest expansion, The Seeds of Destruction, has been out for a month now.  It's been announced w/ details since the Summer.

It still doesn't have a Wikipedia entry.  Simply put, nobody's bothered.  All the previous EverQuest expansions have them, though they've grown less and less detailed over time.  This is the first time this has happened to them.

By contrast: As you might imagine, the entry for WotLK is pretty robust.

Here's a thought:  Wikipedia is eminently data-mineable.  Who wants to bet that a chart showing frequency of wikipedia edits to a game's page over time would be a harbinger of how well a game is doing?  It'd also give us an interesting comparison metric between titles whose sub numbers aren't released.

[Lum]

Not a really good metric. UO has its latest expansion on Wikipedia. I seriously doubt EQ1 has dropped below UO's 135k.

[schild]

Seriously, you're just adding to my feeling that new people shouldn't be allowed to make threads.

[Ratman_tf]

EverQuest  424
 #185  Sony Online Entertainment  Sony Online Entertainment 

[schild]

Just for reference - my comment was directly related to how incredibly stupid it was to use wikipedia as a sort of market barometer in any way.

Sure, I could see EQ going down in flames soon. Inevitable, really, all games die some day. But datamining wikipedia for that stuff? hahahahahahah. NO.

[Wasted]

I don't understand what secret knowledge people are trying to divine from all these analysis.  You can track all the gaming sites and google trends and whatthefuckever you like and all it really is going to do is reinforce what in general most casual observers already can make pretty good guesses at.  Its not going to give subscription numbers, if people try to derive sub numbers from them no will agree anyway.  Its all over-analysis by people that need to spend more time enjoying games.

[Ratman_tf]

I don't understand what secret knowledge people are trying to divine from all these analysis.  You can track all the gaming sites and google trends and whatthefuckever you like and all it really is going to do is reinforce what in general most casual observers already can make pretty good guesses at.  Its not going to give subscription numbers, if people try to derive sub numbers from them no will agree anyway.  Its all over-analysis by people that need to spend more time enjoying games.

We're all a bunch of internet gossips.

[Pezzle]

EQ has been around for almost a decade.  You know that group who played it when it was new?  Yea, we don't use Xfire.  Those servers will stay up as long as money can be made.  Doom predictions need a bit more data.  Subgroup %'s and random entries do not qualify.

[Ubvman]

Not a really good metric. UO has its latest expansion on Wikipedia. I seriously doubt EQ1 has dropped below UO's 135k.

Seriously, what is the best guess on UO and EQ1's sub numbers these days?

Anecdotal feedback from my friends who still play EQ1 is that the latest expansion is same old same old ball of big meh. Wikipedia may not be a good metric - but specific EQ1 class forums are relatively dead these days. I'll try google up my old haunts and see if they are still there.

[Sophismata]

Data-mining edits to Wikipedia will tell you how many people are editing Wikipedia.

This may or may not correlate to video game popularity, the position of the moon, what you ate for breakfast, etc...

[Tale]

A sign in a microcosm of where EQ1 is now: I was an officer of Aurora Noctum on the Tribunal, one of the best known Aussie EQ1 raiding guilds, established in 2000. Some of us were the same people who co-founded the first large-scale Aussie guild Southern Legion in 1999. I quit EQ1 in late 2002.

The guild continued on, outlasting many of the US raiding guilds on The Tribunal. Eventually it was left as nearly the top raiding guild on the server. Even the biggest Aussie raiding guilds on other servers disbanded, but ours kept going because people looking for a guild in our time zone transferred over - and we had an incredibly loyal core membership. Some of them played from 1999 to 2008.

It ended at the previous expansion. They left EQ1 and started playing EQ2. These are the most die-hard of the die-hard EQ1 crowd, and they pretty much consider EQ1 to be over.

It's also happening to EQ2. It hasn't been possible to buy an EQ1 expansion in the shops here for a while now, because nobody distributes them. EQ2 has just released an expansion too, and for the first time nobody is distributing that in Australia either - even the independent import stores are yet to strike a deal. It's WotLK or nothing.

[Ubvman]

I did a quick unscientific round-up for the forums of ALL fourteen EQ1 classes. Basically I googled "Everquest (class) forums" and looked at the first result. Not bad, all the 14 classes still have dedicated forums with ACTIVE game related discussions within the past few days. I was expecting dead sites filled with porn spam. Obviously some are more "active" than others - but the existence of dedicated class forums run by players (not official Sony forums or part of Stratics etc) indicate that there is still interest out there for the game.

Lum at Broken Toys just provided a neat link for the latest "guesstimate" analysis of MMOG subs:
http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/11/23/predicting-player-figures-for-any-online-game-or-mmo/

Based on their numbers - Everquest 1 guesstimates @ 18K subs and Everquest 2 guesstimates @ 73K subs

IMHO, about right on EQ2 but way too low for EQ1 (my own guesstimate is around 50K).
 

[Azazel]

I checked out my EQ guild's site. They're pretty much dead now - they had an internal split after I left that didn't help much, so their hardcore are either with out friendly-harder-core raid guild, or with the split group. My previous guild, the aussie one is gone completely. A bunch of them jumped ship to Tale's former guild a few years ago, but after he left. I know some of them have been in EQ2 for quite awhile, not sure who made it to WoW.

[Venkman]

Lum at Broken Toys just provided a neat link for the latest "guesstimate" analysis of MMOG subs:
http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/11/23/predicting-player-figures-for-any-online-game-or-mmo/

Finally we can stop arguing over SB's questionable methodologies and start b*itching about these questionable methodologies 

Ah the times they are achangin'.

[Lantyssa]

Yeah... as I said in the Xfire thread, it might give you trends within a game.  If you had a solid subscription number at a couple of points and could correlate Xfire data at those points it might be able to give current subscribers within less than a magnitude of error.

Using CoX and EVE to predict WoW though?  Not going to happen.  Adaption will vary between games.

[JoeTF]

Data-mining edits to Wikipedia will tell you how many people are editing Wikipedia.

This may or may not correlate to video game popularity, the position of the moon, what you ate for breakfast, etc...

It will tell you how many players care enough AND are wikipedos. That metric doesn't have anything to do with title's popularity or playerbase size.

[WindupAtheist]

Not a really good metric. UO has its latest expansion on Wikipedia. I seriously doubt EQ1 has dropped below UO's 135k.

I'd be perfectly willing to accept the premise that EQ1 is in even worse shape than UO, if only because nobody has done a megamillion dollar super-polished remake of UO. That being said, yeah, you're probably right and Wikipedia doesn't really mean anything.

[Yegolev]

Lum at Broken Toys

Oh, THAT Lum.

[WayAbvPar]

Lum at Broken Toys

Oh, THAT Lum.

[Dtrain]

nobody has done a megamillion dollar super-polished remake of UO.

They do get points for trying/threatening to about 15 times.

[Simond]

Lum at Broken Toys

Oh, THAT Lum.

[Lantyssa]

I'm with Lum on this one.  No, the other one.

[Slyfeind]

I'm currently playing EQ1, and played UO a few months earlier this year. Both seem rather active, even if the low and mid-level areas are devoid of players. There's new users every day, and then there's the raiders. Not much in-between.

I'm fairly certain UO and EQ will still be in service centuries from now, long after people have forgotten about WoW. Both have tried face-lifts at one point or another, but not much has come of it. Honestly I don't want to see those remade. I go back to them because of the way they are, not the way they could be. I always play UO on the old client, and gawd I wish they'd return Freeport and Rivervale to the way they once were. And my dream job will always be revisiting content for the low and mid level areas in EQ. Even if nobody ever plays it! It would be FUN!

[Azazel]

I'm fairly certain UO and EQ will still be in service centuries from now, long after people have forgotten about WoW.

You forgot the green.