test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Seems STO is still popular
zedbrightlander1
Member Posts: 14,782 Arc User
I came across this Website and if the data is accurate, STO is still doing pretty well for a 13 year old game.
https://mmo-population.com/r/sto
2.8 million subscribers and players seems fairly healthy to me, but I only play the game, I don't manage them for a living, so what do I know?
https://mmo-population.com/r/sto
2.8 million subscribers and players seems fairly healthy to me, but I only play the game, I don't manage them for a living, so what do I know?
Sig? What sig? I don't see any sig.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
0
Comments
Sometimes I'll do story arcs. I have two new DRs so will play them for the goodies. Still have my Klingon recruit to advance for his n her goodies. My Romulan DR I made still needs to do her thing too. I'll work them one at a time and play whoever wants to play most
Hmm... That makes me wonder where they are getting their data from.
It's all extrapolated from Steam (something that for example I don't and have never used to play STO or any Cryptic game), and other Internet traffic sources as beyond quarterly investor reports - they don't release that info publically in any form. So who knows? The site is known for overestimating usage more than underestimating it for games that DON'T publically release info.
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..."
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Imagine if ESO didn't have the Elder Scrolls IP, would people still play it sure, but an ESO without the IP would have a smaller player count as a result compared to an ESO with the Elder Scrolls IP,
The IP factor makes a huge difference when it comes to popularity,
Not saying that you couldn't make an IP from scratch, however it'll take more work, since you'll need a ton of fans and become relevant enough to be a culture icon for it to work.
The only other Star Trek games that are any good are Elite Force (FPS), Armada 2 (RTS) and Birth of The Federation (4X) (in modded form), and Supremacy gets an honourable mention as it basically BoTF2 made by fans. The Starfleet Command series are 'STO-lite' but with more realistic ship loadouts and arcs, power demands, damage management and the complete lack of screen-spewing effects
I suspect they probably do this trick for STO since Cryptic usually does not publish the numbers themselves but do nothing to hide the shard information in the game itself, and their bots would probably not have been detected and booted because they do not have the bad behavior that makes exploitation bots a problem. They could do their job by quietly logging in hourly or at least a few times a day while running a recorder like streamers use, taking a look at the map for the instance counts, and maybe taking a look at lag or something or gather some other information and log back off. Then they could just screenscrape the recordings.
While accuracy in absolute ranking of games against each other is not exactly pinpoint accurate, the over-time trends statistics within each game is pretty good for those games that have shard counts and whatnot available like STO does. Some games though are so tightfisted with information that anomalies like Wildstar and World of Darkness that irishhawkdrake already mentioned do happen.
One of the least accurate methods sites like that have to fall back on for some of the least cooperative games is (weird as it sounds) looking at Discord group and forum traffic density for the games. That is probably what is going on with World of Darkness since they have very active Discord channels that contain traffic for both the defunded-and-defunct MMO (CCP proved to be a predator rather than a savior for it) and the still popular tabletop game (along with rumblings about other proposed MMOs based on White Wolf games from other developers).
That brings up a different point btw, the popularity of a game based on other media is not strictly based on the popularity of the other media, as the World of Darkness fiasco shows. Both Old World of Darkness and New World of Darkness are still very popular in the tabletop market yet failed repeatedly in trying to make the jump to MMO.
Defiance is a good example of it going the other way, the TV show was never very popular despite the extreme level of hype the production company made about it, yet the game was popular for quite a while.
And of course, if the Star Trek name was the most important factor than many of the failed games based on it would still be around. The fact is that while it could use some facelifts and touchups here and there, and it has some annoying things just like every other game does, STO does a lot of things right and that is a bigger factor than a lot of people seem to think.
Cryptic used to publish ads here about how many ships were used, how many characters were created, and so on. I remember seeing it either here or as a link in the login screen. Somebody somewhere knows exactly how many players there are and the like. I'm willing to bet 5 quatloos this information is as closely guarded as nuclear launch codes are.
I don't worry too much over this sort of stuff. Because the people publishing it have their own motives for doing so. Which may not dovetail with mine. The game is successful enough GearBox bought it. Which means it will not sunset next Tuesday. When Tuesday arrives, I'll worry about it then.
EDIT: I'm actually surprised one of the Doom and Gloom types hasn't posted here yet. Since March, 2012, there always seems to be somebody somewhere telling the rest of us STO is doomed to fall almost immediately because reasons.
I'm still waiting on SFC 2.
If anyone knows the exact numbers, its going to be Cryptic.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
BoTF is freeware, so go download it. Get the 'All the Ages' or 'Dominion' Mod installed for the best experience with BoTF. You can also get Supremacy, which is built on BoTF, but it's quite buggy.
You mean this Freeware?
https://myabandonware.com/game/star-trek-the-next-generation-birth-of-the-federation-bcm
Found this years ago. It never worked for me.
We really enjoy just creating stories out of whatever we are doing. We don’t stress the Meta and we are in advance play with no issues. A few more upgrades around the group and we are going to tackle elite. Are we expecting to steamroll thru it? Not at all. We just want to be able to beat them as a team.
That’s where I think STO is really great. You can play solo and do just fine or you can play as a group and do well. There’s really no “one way” to play the game.
https://www.armadafleetcommand.com/botf
This is the site you need. It has a custom installer that lets the game run on Win 7+ and there are many versions you can choose to play.
Yeah the latitude STO has to mold into whatever you want it to be (more serious, more casual, more build oriented, more creative, more social, ect.) is in part why I've stuck around for so long (>11 years now) with my fleet mates (core of which I've known for those 11 years) and wider community. STO's a nice, well worn, comfy couch to flop back on after a long day and play with your Trek toys as you'd like. No other game I've found is like that and I don't envision any that could replace it 1:1 (especially in the F2P market given how it's priorities have evolved since STO's launch, away from some of its initial design priorities. Ex. low stress and expansive customization.)
Had we the Foundry still, it'd be even more perfect (as that added yet another layer to the be-what-you-want-it-to dynamic). But the base game is still plenty robust *enough* to be a flexible playground for the imagination (with enough substance to make your creations feel more impactful than a 3D editor or rote RPG. It's not just the flexibility in paths, its the context the game adds through setting, gameplay, and story to those choices).
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
On the point of such efforts: I've considered how to capture STO's population recently (from a professional background in stats), and there isn't a good way to do it. Skimming users per instance, for example, across social hubs can give you a point estimate to a population lump but even if you sampled multiple times a day those static numbers don't tell you anything about user turnover in that time. You see 200 people now and 200 people in an hour. Is the population 200, 400, >400, or an intermediate? And if the latter, how much larger or how intermediate? STO can be a very casual game and your daily time on ESD may only be a few *seconds* as you queue up for an event TFO. There's no way of accounting for that with zone counts to any approximate degree. Even if you follow someone and time them until they disappear, did they log off or just switch characters? You have no idea without spamming their chat. And if they just beam out for a map change or TFO, they're lost to you. And the TFO/Patrol/Episode populations are completely invisible to public data AFAIK. The only available proxies for those (which are very weak and unwieldy) are TFO wait time and how many players are hanging around the sector block (which has the same issues as estimating populations from social hubs). We have no idea to even an approximate degree what rough proportion of the population is taken up by actively playing content. There's just no grounding here.
What these estimates depend on are what behaviors you emphasize and how you assume demographics are distributed (for example: between vets managing systems/space barbie/exchange activity vs. newbies focusing on the story grind, or vets vs. popcorn gamers managing their dailies and hopping off). That broadly means that any estimate attempt is filling in the pattern one presumes is there to generate any numbers. There's not enough info to make it an informative exercise. Even bracketing where STO falls with respect to other MMO's (in relative terms) can be dicey as any variance in player behavior (ex. time spent logged in, time spent in hubs) can throw your rankings without orders of magnitude difference in populations to make the differences obvious at a glance. And it would likely be simpler to guess relative popularity from social media activity (though this is also making demographic assumptions that games being more or less social in direct mechanics void). I'm not sure how far ranking websites care about these concerns, their MMO numbers only need to look good enough for gamer traffic.
The only possible method I know of to estimate the population for a game like STO is the capture mark recapture method (used in wildlife ecology). Every time you go somewhere in game, you treat that as a sampling event and record every user you can who is also there (by name). Then you use the rates of seeing those users in future sampling events to estimate the total population (as the larger the population the lower the odds of any individual being recaptured. Observed probabilities scale back to population estimates). But to do this would require a massive and methodical sampling effort (widely distributed) that I don't think anyone is equipped/willing to undertake for the whole game. (a single TFO on the other hand would be a more viable target.)
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
I'm on Windows 10, but I'll have a look.
I'm not sure how they gauge numbers by sentiment, but seems strange wording.
https://www.armadafleetcommand.com/get-files?cw_action=fileview&file_id=1958
You need to scroll to the bottom of the page and enter the keyword into the box to progress to the download.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
It does have Armada I and II mods on it, and as far as I know they work on WIN10. I haven't played it in ages though, but I'm sure vanilla Armada II does work from disc or ISO on WIN 10. Fleet Ops is an awesome mod for Armada II btw.
https://www.armadafleetcommand.com/armada
https://www.fleetops.net/
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
Moderation Problems/Issues? Please contact the Community Manager
Terms of Service / Community Rules and Policies / FCT
Facebook / Twitter / Twitch
I have checked, and I have it running from the original disc's installer with no issue, and it plays fine. Try starting autorun.exe from the disc with 'adminstrator privileges'. Failing that try patching the game with Patch 1.1.
https://www.armadafleetcommand.com/get-files?cw_action=fileview&file_id=145
It could be your disc is the original unpatched release.
Glad to have been of help! Don't get too lost in playing it!