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So howz the population?
jtmarsh
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Its been asked before and I know we wont get a answer from Cryptic unless it hits a million and they can brag;) But do you think its up or down. Do you think we have 100k active people? 150k? Facebook likes are at 240k plus. But that does not mean much. I admit since day one I don't have not made a lot of friends. Maybe 12 good ones since launch. Of those I only see about 4 pop up from the day one group.
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But you have to remember, that by november 2011, we have barely had any updates to the game, and no significant upgrades in a year.
However, I don't think the stable player count is significantly higher now than it was midway/latter part of 2010.
So what's the pop # grand total? Are we looking in the wrong place or something?
I agree with thecosmic1's assessment.
(UFP) Ragnar
No Klingons play?
The question in the OP seemed to be more "What is the actual number of active players" than "Does STO have a population large enough to warrant more updates" and that was to the effect of what I commented on. Obviously STO has grown since going free to play, certainly it is big enough to bring forth more updates. But as for the original posters question, how many? I guess the answer to that can basically be summarized as we don't know and will never know.
I saw someone flying around the other day too. It wasn't that hard, there were at least 20 people there in that instance.
KDF doesn't have any optometrists
KDF is what... 17% of total population?
Honestly season 8 brought back a number of my fleet members and gave us some hope for a brighter future... but lately we've been playing that "other Star MMO" and its storyline and smoothness of gameplay blow STO out of the water.
Don't delude yourself folks, STO may be doing fine now... but the clock is ticking. There is some BIG competition coming soon, and the Trek universe the game is in won't go on forever. If nothing else I can see a new STO based in the JJ-verse coming out after that movie series is finished.
lol that's made me laugh.
I can't see it happening. in fact an awful lot would have to happen in following films. if the current sto was based on only all the non jj-verse films the star trek universe would be extremely sparse.
Did I say DOOM? It's not like the population is going to fall to zero tomorrow, or even in the next year once the competition rolls out... but STO doesn't have another 4 years in it, let's be realistic about that.
Well, I doubt they'd be ponying up cash for the actual Star Trek actors to do voice over (such things aren't cheap) if STO wasn't bringing in a lot of cash flow for PWE. PWE doesn't seem to spend a lot on games that aren't doing well (take a look at Champions Online for example as that game sees a minor content addition maybe once or twice a year of late, and the latest content addition to CO equates to something like one of STO's PvE repeatable queue missions such as 'The Breech'.)
So, based on the fact that:
- They've gotten both Michael Dorn and Tim Russ to do VO
- They've added an FE and multiple new zones for Season 8
- They added an FE for Season 8.5 which will be continued in the Season 9 launch.
- They have announced and confirmed that STO will get another 'expansion' (the last expansion was 'Legacy of Romulus') before the end of 2014.
I'd say all indications are STO 'cash flow wise' - is doing well enough for PWE currently that they are putting money back into the game and continuing to add content atm.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
RedditChat, PublicEliteSTF, and Doffjobs are pretty active to me. I think it depends on which channels you are in.
(UFP) Ragnar
No offense intended but, I bet they are relatively cheap to get. Voice acting seems an easy paycheck, imo. Sit and read lines, sign me up. Didn't some Trek actor do lines for some game over their freaking cellphone? Don't even have to leave home to get paid. :rolleyes:
Although it is a little known fact, Cryptic has been working on an alpha build specifically for the Quo'nos market for a while now. However, lightspeed latency is a heavy restriction on the game servers, and as such, until the laws of conventional physics are bypassed by the discovery of subspace, they will be unable to devote significant resources to this port.
Problem is, for everyone who says "STO only has XYZ years/months left in it," there is someone else who insists they'll be making money forever just because it has Star Trek in the name.
Which one is it? Answer: Nobody knows. I do know, however, that predictions of the game's death have been very rampant for years. I was hearing them ever since the second anniversary (I joined shortly before), and obviously none of them bore out. Eventually in all likelihood something will happen. However, every bump in the road, even a significant bump, is called doom on the forum. If it is not doom now, it is an "obvious" sign of doom later, at least to someone. I would say neither of these are so. STO has beaten predictions before. A lot of them. And there are other MMOs that are around for a lot longer than seven years that don't seem to be in danger of death. While many on the forums decry STO as not having that sort of depth, I've also seen many opinions to the contrary.
The clock is ticking, but the clock is ticking on everything. Yes, there are arguably bad decisions now. I'm not happy about the lack of hourly events. However, they're still a long way from hitting the bottom. Personally, I would say that their biggest enemy is grind. However, just about any game is going to run into the grind problem sooner or later, because putting together content that takes weeks that is consumed in hours is too expensive for most companies to try to keep up with on a constant basis, especially if they're expected to produce an endless stream of it. And yes, some people think there should be new FE's on a daily basis. How they can bypass that grind problem, if they even need to bypass that, I couldn't say. Their second biggest enemy may be technology. The engine has some pretty stark limits, and those aren't helping creativity much. There's the possibility of doing an actual engine overhaul, but it seems unlikely they'd do that, although that may be in the works if a second iteration ever comes about. Third, the license, which may be especially difficult to handle, but I think the details of that are likely clear as mud without inside information. This is stuff they probably go to great lengths to bury.
Furthermore, while there is "big" competition coming - which is, let's not kid ourselves, Star Citizen - Star Citizen seems to appeal to a majorly different kind of gamer. Basically it seems to be bearing out to be Eve Online meets Wing Commander. Not everyone wants to play Eve, not everyone wants to play WC, and a lot of people who would play one won't play both stuck together. In fact, one of STO's features (not problems) is the fact that it is NOT Eve. It is a selling point. Furthermore, statistically speaking, I would say the odds are against it living up to the full height of the hype, even if it is a good game that does well. It does not matter what names are on board for it. While it's possible it might manage to live up to it, most games (and things in general) just don't manage it, especially when the community takes up the charge and ramps up the hype by themselves, as seems to have happened here.
A lot of the problems Cryptic ran into in the past were because Atari was sucking the blood out of it like a leech. Plus, IIRC, it was Atari who basically said once a game is developed it no longer makes sense to add content (not sure on that, but it sure sounds right). PWE pulling Cryptic out pretty much saved the game from exploding along with Atari. It's difficult to advance or promote a game if you're having difficulty keeping the lights on, as STO did for a good bit of its existence. The situation is bumpy now, but it does not necessarily indicate an imminent portent of doom by any means.
Finally, the longevity of the Prime universe versus the JJ universe does not strike me as being crippling. Many franchises run multiple fictional universes in parallel. In some this has become the norm, and in at least one they practically codified it as part of the metaverse (Transformers, where one could argue that literally every fanfic is somehow, somewhere, canon). In some ways this is advantageous. They can capitalize on the older stuff and make sure it will not interfere with the newer stuff, while the newer stuff can be flashy, eye-catching, money-making and draw in new people without having to worry what the online game is doing. But there is more than enough crossover to draw fans from one into the other.
Long story short - how much time does STO have? Answer - no one knows, but it's looked pretty good for it so far, and the forums seem to have a strong tendency to play up negativity in interpreting these kind of events. While I am not saying that you yourself are calling "immediate doom," you seem to be putting an expiration date on it pretty solidly, and I think it's very premature to do so.
since the sub days, that used to hang around perhaps a thousand players at most i would imagine, but with f2p, it was turned upside down shaken about and then put the right way up with PWE, some of the choices granted were not ones i would of wanted, however they have clearly pulled in many more players since the sub days with Atari. the first fleet i was with back in 11, there was 1 person from in europe who i used to hang out with on the game within that fleet, doing stf's, typically got the ball rollng on TS3 but that fleet basically died when it was decided to merge that fleet and a WoW clan in preparation for SWTOR when it was about to come out. needless to state, shortly before it was about launch, i got the beta invite to the game through being in the clan and it was the last beta and left that guild and got burned, in the process i lost contact with that one in game friend who was on STO and jumped over as well. came back to STO joined another fleet and within a week got burned again and lost complete contact with that in game friend. i dunno where he is now or what hes doing, but that was the only one who has attempt to keep any contact (also the last time i would ever join a fleet).
in any event though, i would say that STO's game population is pretty strong, instances are usually full by rush hour and most instances elsewhere have a few people in them. i would imagine maybe 1k people during the morning and perhaps 100k later in the day, but like anyone else asking us the question is silly because we do not know.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
As for steam chart, accurate (or not) as they are, since they only show the steam population, they also seems fine :
STO steam chart.
In fact, they are about the same than for the Eve online steam chart, which is a successful MMO. Last time I checked, Eve had about 30k active people logged on the game server in average.