Gawd, this reminds me of TOR where you pay for play content.
Buy to play would be a nice alternative such as Guild Wars. I would gladly pay 20-30 for a story/feature expansion every 3-6 months and the occasional new ship (which I do anyways). I am sure there are tens of thousands of trek fans who would do the same. Throw in a few other microtransactions and you can do away with P2W for the most part.
Obviously this won't generate as much profit as Cryptic's model but it will be more than enough. Look at what Foundry authors can pull off. I am sure Cryptic with professional writers and devs can do far better.
Sadly people think F2P is actually free. It is far from it and leads to an emphasis on micro transactions instead of content. After all, we don't pay for content directly so the incentive is to work on the other stuff.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Gawd, this reminds me of TOR where you pay for play content.
As opposed to how it is now with almost no feature episodes? I am honestly surprisd how STO can come up with huge updates like Legacy of Romulus and not have to charge for it. It must be making a lot of money to be able to do that.
As opposed to how it is now with almost no feature episodes? I am honestly surprisd how STO can come up with huge updates like Legacy of Romulus and not have to charge for it. It must be making a lot of money to be able to do that.
For first, id love to be without that zen if it would mean a chance for one free ship per character kind of stuu or options to do much less grinding and so on. Every race for subscribers, not playable when not subscribed for example.
Naturally this game makes money like crazy, just look how much Avenger class was praised, a single ship which costs prolly more real money than developing one
Meanwhile, content is not required. People allways complain of mission content. So why make expensive mission content when you usy slap new ship together and call it a day.
If content like Legacy of Romulus, which is really great in story and feeling of trek as Romulan or Reman.... Would come once a year with all the story content the game would do much better. I just wanyt to see the day when they actually would implement multiple storylines like career storylines, diplomacy story lines, explorartion story lines and naturally more war story lines <_<
If they would add few hundred well made and themed missions with new areas and ships and so on, i would actually pay for that stuff 30e or so.. Or even less if made in special quality WOW like collectors editions. When i pre ordered, i took that collectors edition version of this game, it was disaapointment. Not only that collector special stuff came to everyone later, the box itself was cheap ly made and had litle extra content (This i knew when i bought) but the t-shirt was great and it still is in its package. Anyways, Previously, i had WOW collectors editions and i expected similar quality from at least the box itself which is item to have on showcase or was meant to be.
I seem to be rambling, im tired and forgot all the time what im writing so excuse me if i just wrote bunch of nonsense, good night
been playing games a long time.. tend to read up on them a little too much..
I would say that the active players per week is under 100k..
honestly, if it was above 200k per week, and it was really rolling in the cash, they would stop messing around and get a real sized dev team for a game of that size.. but since they don't, I assume it is a relatively low pop... especially since I have watched friends fleets, and people I have played with for a long while just stop logging in (and this is for more than 5 months..
im not saying the game is in the toilet, just saying that all signs lead to a small pop, and the run the game as such...
Not from subscribers. There is cosmetic stuff that you can only buy with money plus some boosts and i buy stuff at times. Also if im not entirely wrong it still works in the way that the characters you have been playing when subscribed, have still all the content open for mere moths sub. There is limitations nayturally but when i play it, i dont feel that game has suffered anything from f2p.
When i play here, i just feel that they add miniscule amount of content for everyone called seasons which have couple of quests and stuff like that, then i see tons of ships in c-store that are always better than those you get when promoted. That really pisses me off, the advantage you get with real money in game. Sure you can harvest dilithium some moths but that aint fun and feels too much of work when you can just do real life work for hour and buy that ship then >_<
In this game, they really should give some more for mothly sub.
I am thankful for featured episodes, they have been fairly good, the new fed tutorial is great and whole Romulan quest chain to the cutting the cord is superb.
LOTRO is free-to-play with a subscriber option. The difference is that their expansions are not free for the F2P players, they have to pay in LOTRO points. These points can either be very repetitively ground up in-game via the LOTRO equivalent of kill-quests and achievements, or they can be bought outright. The subscribers do get free access to most of the content. . .but for long-term playing, it's more cost-effective to just buy permanent access to expansion areas. Once it's unlocked, you keep it. So, I get the feeling there's a lot of people who are officially free-to-play, but have unlocked all the content in-game and have unlocked a lot of the optional stuff in the LOTRO store, putting them on level with subscribers in terms of access.
It's been some months since I played LOTRO (I switch between MMOs to keep things interesting), but I felt it definitely mastered the blending of F2P with subscription. I suspect part of that is because they charge for expansions, while STO does not. LOTRO basically operates on the principle of a 'free trial'. . .the first 30-35 levels are easily done without paying a single dollar into the game. Beyond that, you have to unlock different regions and probably pay a bit for extra goodies. Probably brings in a healthy amount of revenue, as long as everything's good. STO relies almost entirely on either gimmicky micro-transactions or on subscriber revenue. Every single shred of content is available to everyone. Lockboxes were probably the biggest financial success the game has seen, but they're unbalancing everything even further with every season/expansion.
I went around and added up all of the instances in the six most popular zones in the game about an hour ago.
Sphere Battlezone - 2530
Sphere Contested - 1450
Sphere Allied Space - 1210
Sphere Command - 2100
ESD and Sol - 940
DS9 and DS9 Orbit - 340
This doesnt even count new rom, defera, blah blah blah
Thats 3am in the US on a friday night. I found over 8,000 people on just in the few places I looked.
Doesnt include whoever was running in STFs or private matches, pvp, all that
So for a serious response, Id wager it is around 500,000 active players in a given week.
This is really the only way we players have to determine how many people actually play. One thing you have to keep in mind is that STO is in a high period right now, with the release of Season 8. It'll probably continue being reasonably active during the winter due to school break, etc.
I'd wager the average activity to be lower than that. I don't gauge by 'oh, it takes half an hour to load up such-and-such instance'. The reason why that happens is because said instances are usually instances nobody wants to do, or has time to do. Everyone's busy scrambling to keep up with reputation grinds, busy doffing, busy sharking the Exchange, or otherwise not running instances that just don't have any essential 'value' beyond what replayability they have and a bit of spare dilithium. It's partially the problem PvP has, I feel, because there's no driving 'need' to PvP, and there are no great rewards from PvP. It's a side activity that is ultimately subordinate to PvE and its reputation grinds and whatnot.
Imho it's almost impossible, especially for outside observers like us, to identify the number of players in a F2P game. There is too much fluctuation and since there is no cost involved, also the issue of people running multiple accounts.
Who would be considered an "active player"? Before you could just count the number of active subs, now you can't even identify weather it's two unique people playing with two seperate accounts via the same IP, or just one person tending to his alt-farm.
If you hate the game so much why are you here? Seriously. You bash Cryptic in almost every one of your posts, usually for no readily apparent reason. Do you even play the game?
I find it somewhat disturbing that people seem to hang around the forums just to "hang around with their friends," yet take every opportunity they possibly can to say what a horrible company Cryptic is and what a horrible game STO is.
Dont really need a link, common sense will tell you that if you have anywhere from 5000-10000 players in the five or six most populated zones around the clock, then you could easily translate that into 100k.
I actually translate it to nearer 500k. People really underestimate things in this game. When the CE event was running a month ago there were literally thousands of people in each queue, and that was just the public matches.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
One month after a new season is released....200,000
When a new shiny ship is released (inside of a lockbox).....500,000
When they nerf something.....1,500,000 (on this forum throwing a tantrum) & 20,000 (on the game until they discover that something has been nerfed or they just don't care about the nerfing).
That's just my 2 cents.
One day Cryptic will be free from their Perfect World overlord. Until that day comes, they will continue to pamper the whales of this game, and ignore everyone that isn't a whale.
I used the same datapoint in my estimates. That was back when it was still a subscription based game. Traditionally F2P games will have more than double the population they had when they were pay to play. LOTRO and DDO both had this effect, though WoW has been in decline for years, they did see a huge jump when they went F2P.
The only game out there right now thats on a true decline even after a F2P model was introduced is SWTOR, but that may be due to the serious replay value issues ive read about.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
I used the same datapoint in my estimates. That was back when it was still a subscription based game. Traditionally F2P games will have more than double the population they had when they were pay to play. LOTRO and DDO both had this effect, though WoW has been in decline for years, they did see a huge jump when they went F2P.
Yeah, F2P does have an affect since players who couldn't play, now could.
The only game out there right now thats on a true decline even after a F2P model was introduced is SWTOR, but that may be due to the serious replay value issues ive read about.
Not sure about other MMOs, but yes TOR is dying. As I said prior, they severely cut back on their servers and their populations are still on a decline. And their dev team is so desperate that they are finally adding true space combat. Unfortunately it's only for PvP and F2P players won't be able to play for months after release.
In a way, the STO Devs should learn from TOR's failing, because TOR pretty much was a twin to STO in terms of genera. They ignored the playerbases most powerful requests and held off for too long.
The TRIBBLE monkeys running TOR actually thought they were launching a WoW-killer, and you could literally hear them scream in terror and soil their panties when players 6 month subs expired and were never renewed. That's when they announced their panicked decision to switch to F2P so they could stay in business.
While I did have high hopes for TOR (Not as a WoW killer though) You have to admit a lot of that was player hype. I mean I can't tell you how many times I've heard people refer to it as the WoW killer...even heard people (though less) speak of GW2 as the killer.
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
Oh hell yeah. Players have an amazing gift for deluding themselves, but in TOR's case the company deluded themselves almost as much as the players did.
To be fair, the buyout by EA in the middle of development likely caused most of the internal issues that ended up coming out with the original launch.
People on these forums think Cryptic/PWE are money grabbing vampires, but the most evil MMO company to ever exist is without a doubt Electronic Arts. They showcase this in their sports console games by merely reskinning and updating the rosters on top of the same engine they have used for the game for the last 15 years running.
Nothing new, and I called it the moment I heard of the buyout.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
They have been accurately reporting figures for nearly a decade. Its literally what they do.
Since no one outside the companies knows the real number, that's an untenable position.
What they've been doing for a decade is estimating, with an unverifiable degree of accuracy.
"Participation in PVP-related activities is so low on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis that we could in fact just completely take it out of STO and it would not impact the overall number of people [who] log in to the game and play in any significant way." -Gozer, Cryptic PvP Dev
Since no one outside the companies knows the real number, that's an untenable position.
What they've been doing for a decade is estimating, with an unverifiable degree of accuracy.
That's your opinion. You have no idea what channels they use or what resources they use to get those numbers. All you are doing is judging people without facts to disprove their accuracy.
Comments
Gawd, this reminds me of TOR where you pay for play content.
Buy to play would be a nice alternative such as Guild Wars. I would gladly pay 20-30 for a story/feature expansion every 3-6 months and the occasional new ship (which I do anyways). I am sure there are tens of thousands of trek fans who would do the same. Throw in a few other microtransactions and you can do away with P2W for the most part.
Obviously this won't generate as much profit as Cryptic's model but it will be more than enough. Look at what Foundry authors can pull off. I am sure Cryptic with professional writers and devs can do far better.
Sadly people think F2P is actually free. It is far from it and leads to an emphasis on micro transactions instead of content. After all, we don't pay for content directly so the incentive is to work on the other stuff.
- Judge Aaron Satie
They do get 500 zen (Equivalent to 5 bucks)
As opposed to how it is now with almost no feature episodes? I am honestly surprisd how STO can come up with huge updates like Legacy of Romulus and not have to charge for it. It must be making a lot of money to be able to do that.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
For first, id love to be without that zen if it would mean a chance for one free ship per character kind of stuu or options to do much less grinding and so on. Every race for subscribers, not playable when not subscribed for example.
Naturally this game makes money like crazy, just look how much Avenger class was praised, a single ship which costs prolly more real money than developing one
Meanwhile, content is not required. People allways complain of mission content. So why make expensive mission content when you usy slap new ship together and call it a day.
If content like Legacy of Romulus, which is really great in story and feeling of trek as Romulan or Reman.... Would come once a year with all the story content the game would do much better. I just wanyt to see the day when they actually would implement multiple storylines like career storylines, diplomacy story lines, explorartion story lines and naturally more war story lines <_<
If they would add few hundred well made and themed missions with new areas and ships and so on, i would actually pay for that stuff 30e or so.. Or even less if made in special quality WOW like collectors editions. When i pre ordered, i took that collectors edition version of this game, it was disaapointment. Not only that collector special stuff came to everyone later, the box itself was cheap ly made and had litle extra content (This i knew when i bought) but the t-shirt was great and it still is in its package. Anyways, Previously, i had WOW collectors editions and i expected similar quality from at least the box itself which is item to have on showcase or was meant to be.
I seem to be rambling, im tired and forgot all the time what im writing so excuse me if i just wrote bunch of nonsense, good night
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I would say that the active players per week is under 100k..
honestly, if it was above 200k per week, and it was really rolling in the cash, they would stop messing around and get a real sized dev team for a game of that size.. but since they don't, I assume it is a relatively low pop... especially since I have watched friends fleets, and people I have played with for a long while just stop logging in (and this is for more than 5 months..
im not saying the game is in the toilet, just saying that all signs lead to a small pop, and the run the game as such...
LOTRO is free-to-play with a subscriber option. The difference is that their expansions are not free for the F2P players, they have to pay in LOTRO points. These points can either be very repetitively ground up in-game via the LOTRO equivalent of kill-quests and achievements, or they can be bought outright. The subscribers do get free access to most of the content. . .but for long-term playing, it's more cost-effective to just buy permanent access to expansion areas. Once it's unlocked, you keep it. So, I get the feeling there's a lot of people who are officially free-to-play, but have unlocked all the content in-game and have unlocked a lot of the optional stuff in the LOTRO store, putting them on level with subscribers in terms of access.
It's been some months since I played LOTRO (I switch between MMOs to keep things interesting), but I felt it definitely mastered the blending of F2P with subscription. I suspect part of that is because they charge for expansions, while STO does not. LOTRO basically operates on the principle of a 'free trial'. . .the first 30-35 levels are easily done without paying a single dollar into the game. Beyond that, you have to unlock different regions and probably pay a bit for extra goodies. Probably brings in a healthy amount of revenue, as long as everything's good. STO relies almost entirely on either gimmicky micro-transactions or on subscriber revenue. Every single shred of content is available to everyone. Lockboxes were probably the biggest financial success the game has seen, but they're unbalancing everything even further with every season/expansion.
This is really the only way we players have to determine how many people actually play. One thing you have to keep in mind is that STO is in a high period right now, with the release of Season 8. It'll probably continue being reasonably active during the winter due to school break, etc.
I'd wager the average activity to be lower than that. I don't gauge by 'oh, it takes half an hour to load up such-and-such instance'. The reason why that happens is because said instances are usually instances nobody wants to do, or has time to do. Everyone's busy scrambling to keep up with reputation grinds, busy doffing, busy sharking the Exchange, or otherwise not running instances that just don't have any essential 'value' beyond what replayability they have and a bit of spare dilithium. It's partially the problem PvP has, I feel, because there's no driving 'need' to PvP, and there are no great rewards from PvP. It's a side activity that is ultimately subordinate to PvE and its reputation grinds and whatnot.
Who would be considered an "active player"? Before you could just count the number of active subs, now you can't even identify weather it's two unique people playing with two seperate accounts via the same IP, or just one person tending to his alt-farm.
I find it somewhat disturbing that people seem to hang around the forums just to "hang around with their friends," yet take every opportunity they possibly can to say what a horrible company Cryptic is and what a horrible game STO is.
Dont really need a link, common sense will tell you that if you have anywhere from 5000-10000 players in the five or six most populated zones around the clock, then you could easily translate that into 100k.
I actually translate it to nearer 500k. People really underestimate things in this game. When the CE event was running a month ago there were literally thousands of people in each queue, and that was just the public matches.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
One month after a new season is released....200,000
When a new shiny ship is released (inside of a lockbox).....500,000
When they nerf something.....1,500,000 (on this forum throwing a tantrum) & 20,000 (on the game until they discover that something has been nerfed or they just don't care about the nerfing).
That's just my 2 cents.
The funny thing... youre probably dead on.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-3.png
But considering I have actual data, unlike you. Guess you're the ones who are WAGing. :rolleyes:
I used the same datapoint in my estimates. That was back when it was still a subscription based game. Traditionally F2P games will have more than double the population they had when they were pay to play. LOTRO and DDO both had this effect, though WoW has been in decline for years, they did see a huge jump when they went F2P.
The only game out there right now thats on a true decline even after a F2P model was introduced is SWTOR, but that may be due to the serious replay value issues ive read about.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
Yeah, F2P does have an affect since players who couldn't play, now could.
Not sure about other MMOs, but yes TOR is dying. As I said prior, they severely cut back on their servers and their populations are still on a decline. And their dev team is so desperate that they are finally adding true space combat. Unfortunately it's only for PvP and F2P players won't be able to play for months after release.
In a way, the STO Devs should learn from TOR's failing, because TOR pretty much was a twin to STO in terms of genera. They ignored the playerbases most powerful requests and held off for too long.
Oh look, denial. You asked for links, and I gave them and you still can't accept it. :rolleyes:
Okay then, lets see YOU come up with some official numbers.
Dan Stahl himself could come in here and post "we have exactly 487,283 accounts active in the last 14 days, and he would be like "youre lying"
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
My character Tsin'xing
While I did have high hopes for TOR (Not as a WoW killer though) You have to admit a lot of that was player hype. I mean I can't tell you how many times I've heard people refer to it as the WoW killer...even heard people (though less) speak of GW2 as the killer.
To be fair, the buyout by EA in the middle of development likely caused most of the internal issues that ended up coming out with the original launch.
People on these forums think Cryptic/PWE are money grabbing vampires, but the most evil MMO company to ever exist is without a doubt Electronic Arts. They showcase this in their sports console games by merely reskinning and updating the rosters on top of the same engine they have used for the game for the last 15 years running.
Nothing new, and I called it the moment I heard of the buyout.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
Yammer Yammer :rolleyes:
Then go to the website and ask them.
He could, but he's not. Because population is one of those things in MMOs that are never revealed to the public, except when you got massive growth.
Only way to really know is being a PWE Stockholder or someone in PWE or Cryptic management.
My character Tsin'xing
They have been accurately reporting figures for nearly a decade. Its literally what they do.
Fleet Admiral Rylana - Fed Tac - U.S.S Wild Card - Tactical Miracle Worker Cruiser
Lifetime Subscriber since 2012 == 17,200 Accolades = RIP PvP and Vice Squad
Chief of Starfleet Intelligence Service == Praise Cheesus
Since no one outside the companies knows the real number, that's an untenable position.
What they've been doing for a decade is estimating, with an unverifiable degree of accuracy.
That's your opinion. You have no idea what channels they use or what resources they use to get those numbers. All you are doing is judging people without facts to disprove their accuracy.