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Not sure if this has been posted here before. Friend of mine just pointed out to me that SC2 online game statistics from xfire don't show very positive future for SC2. It's rapidly dropping which of course isn't good.
![[image loading]](http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/3434/sc2fail.png)
Is this just the casual players doing the sp, trying the mp and then moving on or is there something to be worried about? Or is there just something I'm missing about the stat graph.
There are not much information on how the statistics are calculated so this maybe a bogus info but I thought I would post it if someone can clarify on it.
The link to the xfire page: http://www.xfire.com/games/sc2/StarCraft_II/
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I dont understand why league of legends is played more than sc2
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I think theyre just reading the ingame number of online gamers ?
But it's normal for a game to drop after release. There's always the people who try out the games in the first few days then start playing less
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Unless you can somehow put this in context with the first 20-25 days of other big multiplayer releases, I don't see the value in this. Obviously the amount of activity in a game will drop after it's first couple weekends.
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I think its just casual gamers who go into sc2 and finnish the campaign, try the multiplayer and get destroyed by the HUGE starcraft 1 fanbase and then decide that they are too far behind in skill level and just quit.
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I always see ~1million people online on bnet at minimum (and that's at 12 pm-1am CET which shows my next argument). And I don't have xfire myself which a lot of other people don't have either. For me it just shows that the people with sc2 and xfire are playing less rather than implying it isn't showing a promising future for sc2.
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You have to realize that this numbers are only x-fire users playing the game. They get these data from the x-fire clients.
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On August 22 2010 00:44 Assault_1 wrote: I dont understand why league of legends is played more than sc2 It's a free game
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Xfire is a bad source for statistics imo. Not everyone uses xfire and not everyone keeps xfire running when playing sc2 even when they are playing sc2. It's too inconsistent to actually use that data for anything.
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is it 1 million on bent for each region or just the EU region? cus 1 million is the MAX number i saw ever on bnet for SEA
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8748 Posts
On August 22 2010 00:46 G3nXsiS wrote: I think its just casual gamers who go into sc2 and finnish the campaign, try the multiplayer and get destroyed by the HUGE starcraft 1 fanbase and then decide that they are too far behind in skill level and just quit. The matchmaking isn't that bad. Most people win around 50% of their matchmaking games. The people at the very very bottom of the ladder, who account for a very small minority, have significantly below 50%, just as the people at the very very top of the ladder have significantly above 50%.
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All this really shows is that less xfire users are playing sc2 than they did in the beginning.
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On August 22 2010 00:52 Brazen[six] wrote: All this really shows is that less xfire users are playing sc2 than they did in the beginning.
I understand that it's only xfire users but stats are stats for a reason, they are usually meant to show the direction. So it would make sense that if xfire users are dropping the other users are dropping too. That of course doesn't make that a fact, but that's just the reason I decided to post this
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XFire is not a good measure of total players but it is a good measure of trends. It's the same statistical method Nielson uses for TV ratings, with a constant number of PCs having XFire installed, you can interpolate if the popularity of a game is going up or down.
This is a bad omen for SC2.
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On August 22 2010 00:44 Assault_1 wrote: I dont understand why league of legends is played more than sc2
free and it is a watered down Dota/Hon
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I think this is more in correlation with school starting than anything else.
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This happens with every game. You are just looking at less activity as the game goes on. The big test will be what it looks like a year down the line and whether that can support the professional community.
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not all SC2 players use xfire.
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I believe the "1 million" also consists of people playing WoW. It said a million during beta too, so I don't think the numbers are exactly accurate.
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On August 22 2010 00:47 shannn wrote: I always see ~1million people online on bnet at minimum ...
As far I was aware, the amount of people on Bnet includes WoW + SC2.
Anyone have solid information on this?
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Most blizzard games has never required or even asked you to install XFire, so most people with XFire on their computers would have come from a different game, likely FPS, because I see most FPS games ask to install XFire. So we have a large amount of FPS players playing the games or a few days (campaign most likely), then probably going back to their FPS because they show no interest in multiplayer.
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On August 22 2010 00:44 Assault_1 wrote: I dont understand why league of legends is played more than sc2 It's free and a lot of casual players play the game. Its one of those games easy to pick up and not play for awhile and then pick back up again. There is actually pretty significantly large TL chat room there about 50+ people average. Might even be higher now haven't played in a while.
Also not many people use xfire. I don't and I know my friends don't so... I used to use xfire long time ago but most in game chatting gotten a lot better and with good computers you can just alt tab and see your aim / msn / yahoo messenger w/e you use.
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They are going to lose all of their "casual" gamers very quickly with this horrible UMS system and even worse random teams vs. arranged teams. It's already becoming increasingly hard to find games, because there's almost no one left (outside 1v1) 3 weeks after release.
It's too late.
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On August 22 2010 00:56 junkacc wrote: XFire is not a good measure of total players but it is a good measure of trends. It's the same statistical method Nielson uses for TV ratings, with a constant number of PCs having XFire installed, you can interpolate if the popularity of a game is going up or down.
This is a bad omen for SC2.
I don't see how this is a bad omen for SC2. The graph shows "Hours by Date", meaning the number of total hours xfire users are playing SC2. It makes sense that they play many hours when the game is first released, then don't play as much after they beat the campaign/return to school/get bored of the game. This seems pretty normal to me.
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Well, when you just bought a game, you try it but not everybody gets addicted, loads of people who play FPS might have played the solo, and then tried the multi, they got owned, they raged and went back to CoD... the game is nearly 1 month old now, isn't it ? It will drop at one point...
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Xfire doesn't count for shit, excuse my language. How many users really have xfire installed?
Its the stupidest way to count SC2 players and online SC2 trends.
SC2 can never decrease like that, because you are always online, even when playing SP campaign, challenges or against the AI.
So no, your post and xfire stats are totally absurd!
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I recently starting closing Xfire when playing SC2 since it hurts my performance. A few people I know have been doing the same.
Maybe that has something to do with it?
On August 22 2010 01:35 thehitman wrote: Xfire doesn't count for shit, excuse my language. How many users really have xfire installed?
Checking the source, "Xfire users playing per day 17,767 "
http://www.xfire.com/games/sc2/StarCraft_II/
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Well this could mean any of three things.
1.Less people are playing starcraft in general, this could just be some of the people that tried muliplayer a few times, got destroyed, then tried custom maps for a while and have now gotten bored of those.
2. The type of people that have xfire installed are less likely to play a lot of starcraft, probably because their friends (that they are talking to on xfire) are playing other games and they dont want to be left out.
3. People with xfire are realizing that they get significantly more frames per second when they play with xfire off.
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Dominican Republic463 Posts
On August 22 2010 01:24 Ygz wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 00:47 shannn wrote: I always see ~1million people online on bnet at minimum ... As far I was aware, the amount of people on Bnet includes WoW + SC2. Anyone have solid information on this? pretty sure wow alone in their NA servers has more than a million on a shitty day.
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xfire sucks imo. its for only wow players & rpg girl players.
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On August 22 2010 01:12 hystorm wrote: I think this is more in correlation with school starting than anything else. School shouldn't be starting for another 2-3 weeks at least.
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I think number of SC2 matches played is a far more relevant statistic than people logged in to battlenet. As far as I could tell from memory that has been rising the past few weeks because people finished the campaign and started playing multiplayer.
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On August 22 2010 01:51 farseerdk wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 01:12 hystorm wrote: I think this is more in correlation with school starting than anything else. School shouldn't be starting for another 2-3 weeks at least. School starts upcoming week for me (college) high schools probably in 2.
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I unistalled XFire after they were sold off. Wouldn't be surprised if that had much of an effect.
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Most Xfire players are WoW/DotA (and HoN/LoL) players, it makes sense that they'd quit SCII after finishing the campaign.
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Once SC2 starts producing good UMS and fixes the way you find custom games you will see that chart go back up.
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People still use xfire? You take a viewer hit using it cause some flash versions conflict making the stream unwatchable. Xfire to me isn't worth it because of that. So maybe people in general are catching on to this and using other services as a result.
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this is just xfire and like who uses xfire lmao
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You can't rate the entire sc2 population based on xfire. That only proves xfire users are mostly casual players imo...
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Still.. It's statistics.. that said, this is merely the campaign which requires you to log in.. many people aren't interested in playing multiplayer all the time, but were drawn in to play the campaign
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I played the game for 2 weeks, got tired of it and returned to BW, I just don't like the game T_T.
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I think this Player drop just illustrates the general dislike of Xfire. I know Xfire crashes 100% of my programs so I uninstalled it. Also, no one in my internet friends list or immediate friends circle uses Xfire because it's a sub par niche program
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You guys:
a) don't know how statistics work b) are in denial
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As others have pointed out, xfire isn't required or even related to sc2.
The title of this thread easily could have been "SC2 causing big drop in xfire usage" and that is an equally valid conclusion with the 'statistics' provided.
According to the profiles that sc2ranks.com has, there are more than 10 times the number of just bronze ladder players than there are people who use xfire and sc2 daily, not even considering the other leagues or people who haven't qualified for ladder yet.
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This could instead just mean that xfire isn't doing so hot, you know. Based purely upon the data presented, that is.
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Could also be that a lot of people (like me) like all sorts of games, not purely RTS, and pick up new games. I would be very interested if there is another RTS that over the same period has become more popular.
But in general, of course the popularity dies down. What did you expect? That now everybody and their mom will see the light and worship SC2? It is just another game, except for a small minority of all gamers which happens to post here.
How replayable is the campaign? How great is the story? People will stay and play multiplayer if it adds something to the game and if they like it.
For a resurgence, we will need it to become a bonafide spectator sport, although there will be some increases upon expansion releases. Otherwise, obviously this dropoff makes perfect sense.
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8748 Posts
On August 22 2010 02:25 junkacc wrote: You guys:
a) don't know how statistics work b) are in denial No statistics have been calculated. There's only data. People have brought up good reasons why the data can be interpreted in more than one way. We don't have enough information to conclusively interpret the data.
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cos you cant loiter in chat channels and theres generally not that much to do if ur just facing random teams in team ladder. still see lots of ppl on my friends list playing but seems everyone is doing custom melee instead of team ladder now cos its more social.
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At least in the US, schools and colleges are starting up again. People have less time to play. This is not surprising.
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Every game I play posts this same exact thing so I'm pretty sure it is completely natural for a game to peak on xfire on release week unless it is some game that takes people by surprise so it has poor initial sales but great word of mouth.
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I dont know anyone who uses xfire.
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The drop is probably due to both school starting around now and people having less time, along with the obvious drop from people playing it a ton at the beginning and then playing it a bit less. The graph is completely normal, it rises up on weekends, then falls during the week.
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If the game does drop in popularity it will because of the horrendous custom map system. That's what the majority of people played on bnet, and bnet2 has completely failed in that regard
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On August 22 2010 00:46 G3nXsiS wrote: I think its just casual gamers who go into sc2 and finnish the campaign, try the multiplayer and get destroyed by the HUGE starcraft 1 fanbase and then decide that they are too far behind in skill level and just quit. HUGE starcraft 1 fanbase? Yeah there's the problem... if the fanbase was so huge, then we wouldn't see this dropping number despite the predicted casuals leaving the game.
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Many people might use xfire early on to let all their friends know they're playing sc2. I did this with steam, launched SC2 using steam for a good 2 weeks now that I've got my steam friends added I don't bother.
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On August 22 2010 01:51 farseerdk wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 01:12 hystorm wrote: I think this is more in correlation with school starting than anything else. School shouldn't be starting for another 2-3 weeks at least. Here, most classes start monday.
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Starcraft 2 is not finished yet. Singleplayer is fine, multiplayer is meh. Without a big ums-hit i don't see those numbers rising again until next expansion.
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I think its pretty clear that most people aren't into multiplayer RTS. Lots of people bought the game because its a blizzard title and everyone got hype.
We're all a rare breed.
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ha. Already been said. Pwnt;(
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I don't even know what x-fire is but these statistics wouldn't really surprise me...blizzard really really needs to fix its horrendous UMS system if they want to keep a large majority of casual players. In this day and age a game like SC2 meele is extremely noob unfriendly. You can't just jump in like CoD and instantly own you actually have to work for it. I can imagine an SC/RTS noob jumping in getting demolished for 5 games and never playing again
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I know personally, SC2 is such a resource hog on my comp that I couldnt play much with xfire open (among other programs) so now I just shut everything off while playing SC2 cept winamp (I NEED music in games)
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xfire is such shitty software, everyone i know who used that jumped off it as soon as steam got its life together and sorted out its friends list
this is completely meaningless
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Not really a big surprise. The casual players finished the SP game, played a couple games of MP and realized it's basically SC/BW in 3-D. I'd wager that most people would have preferred something with a little bit more innovation/originality. Of course we are happy that SC2 is SC/BW in 3-D, this site is the biggest SC/BW progaming site on the net.
Xfire is a pretty good indicator of trends because it has such a huge install base. If Steam tracked SC2 usage, we'd see the same trend.
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Everyone wasnts to link Graphical/statistical data X and say OMG is SC2 FAILING!?!? Its propaganda and its bullshit.. Yeah the game will lose players after they have cleared the Campaign becuase probably a good portion of people bought the game for the sole reason of continuing and enjoying the story from the first game 10 years ago. Oh wait you mean 3 weeks later there are less people buzzing about it then LAUNCH? NO WAI!!?! Must mean something is wrong RIGHT? This isnt Everquest and it isnt World of warcraft with an endless quagmire of shit to keep you entertained.
People who enjoy quality balanced RTS Multiplayer will continue to play those who do not will leave. 2v2/3v3/4v4/ If thats your gig guess what most people don't play that garbage for a reason it takes longer for the matchmaker to make those matches AND chances are you won't get a very balanced game skill wise. Xfire is no ultimate guide of data to link and comment on for anything other then your own amusement. the same people who LOVE achievements will play until they can get a reasonable amount of them and then say this game sucks.. you mean I gotta play 3000 matches to get zen master!?!? yeah enough of a rant about this stuff im gunna go back to work 
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The Xfire data as a sampling of the total gamers playing sc2 is in line with what i've been noticing both in terms of people playing sc2 in my region and the people that I personally know playing sc2. Each Friday of the die hard gamers I know less and less show up at night on sc2. This probably doesn't mean the sky is falling , we are older and have more interests. However as opposed to when Brood war came out. It was a race to get home and scarf down our dinner to get in as much games as possible till Saturday morning sunrise. Somethings that I do know would increase the social enjoyment of the game would be community channels and viewable replays by multiple players at the same time (add cheese with this). One of the best aspects of this game to me was when you did somethingi really cool in a game and could say "hey guys lets watch my rep of 20 banelings hitting a command center at 6 minute mark". Right now to me it feels like endless me vs insane comp ai when i click Find Quick match. The ingame social aspect and sense of "starcraft gamers" really isnt' there.
I think the numbers from xfire are pretty reflective as to what is happenning with the general non professional user base. In terms of replayability of the multi player option there appears to be something missing. After every game of broodwar there was an addictive factor that made me want to go another game asap. Here in sc2 I don't get(so far only 2k games total) a sense of racially distinctive race p lay style from Zerg or Toss, only Terran. As of right now , my zerg units (esp hydra/roach) feel like toss units dressed for bugs night out. Lastly, about LoL . They did alot of awesome things for that rts. The music, artwork, gameplay, everything has synergy about it. If it isn't already a rts legend like brood war it will soon follow in its footsteps.
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Means more Xfire users are casual gamers who just got it to play single player. The number on b.net is always floating around 1m
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United States47024 Posts
On August 22 2010 00:46 G3nXsiS wrote: I think its just casual gamers who go into sc2 and finnish the campaign, try the multiplayer and get destroyed by the HUGE starcraft 1 fanbase and then decide that they are too far behind in skill level and just quit. Except the total registered users on ICCup is only a little larger than Diamond, and is dwarfed by the other leagues. Most casuals will never even play a member of this "HUGE starcraft 1 fanbase" in a ladder game.
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It seems consistant with the fact that school is starting back up for alot of people.
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When I used to use Xfire for CSS and WoW I was forever forgetting to turn it on and wondered why no one was speaking to me, also when I play SC2 I don't run anything at all in the background, Xfire isn't a huge memory hog if I remember, but If your running a shitty PC or Laptop like I am, every little helps. People forever claimed the sky was falling on CSS using Xfire numbers.. when the steam numbers.. you know.. the important ones.. showed that to be utter bollocks. Battle.net has shown pretty much between 750,000 - 1.25M since release, and constantly about 40k games being played at euro peak times.
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I didn't even know what xfire was till 2 years ago and..I used it like.. 9 times to actually talk to someone. Yeah I am not going to care about the use of xfire users.
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On August 22 2010 02:36 Liquid`Tyler wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 02:25 junkacc wrote: You guys:
a) don't know how statistics work b) are in denial No statistics have been calculated. There's only data. People have brought up good reasons why the data can be interpreted in more than one way. We don't have enough information to conclusively interpret the data.
Precisely, you obviously don't know how stats work. The large sample size eliminates personal choices people make. ie) Like the reasons people have suggested here.
We've all gone through how SC2 is failing in Korea, now this is some data from the west. SC2 has not been out for less than one month and it's already peaked and falling. If this game were so great, it should be spreading through word of mouth and the data should reflect it.
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I love SC2, but come on. Casual players will not stick with SC2. It is too demanding to have fun.
Let us not kid ourselves here.
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8748 Posts
On August 22 2010 04:06 junkacc wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 02:36 Liquid`Tyler wrote:On August 22 2010 02:25 junkacc wrote: You guys:
a) don't know how statistics work b) are in denial No statistics have been calculated. There's only data. People have brought up good reasons why the data can be interpreted in more than one way. We don't have enough information to conclusively interpret the data. Precisely, you obviously don't know how stats work. The large sample size eliminates personal choices people make. ie) Like the reasons people have suggested here.
There isn't a large sample size of games like SC2. We don't have any idea what pattern of xfire usage data a game needs to have in order to be on track as a successful competitive game.
I think it's true that a lot less people are playing SC2 now than at launch. But I doubt that matters. It seems completely natural. How many of those people were just playing single player and aren't relevant to us at all? How many temporarily took time off work, ignored social obligations, and sacrificed other hobbies so that they could play a lot of SC2 at launch? How much decline matters anyway? Or more to the point, how many people do we need to continue playing to be successful? If 5 billion people played the game at launch, and 4.99 billion stopped playing 2 weeks later, we'd be perfectly fine. That graph would look awful though!
And you have not provided any argument that xfire is not a biased sample. There has certainly been no effort made by anyone to make the xfire gamers representative of all gamers. And even when people do make efforts at good samples, there are often still flaws.
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On August 22 2010 00:47 shannn wrote: I always see ~1million people online on bnet at minimum (and that's at 12 pm-1am CET which shows my next argument). And I don't have xfire myself which a lot of other people don't have either. For me it just shows that the people with sc2 and xfire are playing less rather than implying it isn't showing a promising future for sc2.
The "people online on b.net" accounts for WoW players as well. I would guesstimate at any given time there are 50k or so SC2 players online.
Also, I've played online games for about 10 years now, and I've never met anyone that uses Xfire. And to be honest, I thought the only people that did use it were those that played like online chess and stuff, lol.
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They need to remake the Custom game system, currently its so bad. Whats wrong with the Wc3 system?
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On August 22 2010 04:24 Nihilnovi wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 00:47 shannn wrote: I always see ~1million people online on bnet at minimum (and that's at 12 pm-1am CET which shows my next argument). And I don't have xfire myself which a lot of other people don't have either. For me it just shows that the people with sc2 and xfire are playing less rather than implying it isn't showing a promising future for sc2. The "people online on b.net" accounts for WoW players as well. I would guesstimate at any given time there are 50k or so SC2 players online.
There's about 40k SC2 games up right now. On average a game has more than 2 people in it. Add people who are playing single player or just idling in b.net.
The claimed ~1M online at the moment isn't even enough to cover the saturday evening WoW players in EU.
I don't think it accounts for WoW players.
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doesn't surprise me at all actually. this is what i expect from sc2: huge initial opening with tapering activity in a relatively short amount of time. a lot of people i know are looking for other games. why is this? couple reasons that come to mind:
1. the initial attraction is over 2. there are issues (technical and nontechnical: crashes, rendering probs, logout freezes, no lan, very poor custom games viewing etc) 3. gameplay: (many of the team games involve cheeses and rushes (a lot). void ray rushes, 10 marine pushes, reapers etc. people are tired of the same thing happening over and over. 4. league placement dissatisfaction: lot of people are not in the right league.
and so on.
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On August 22 2010 03:08 Meldrath wrote: Oh wait you mean 3 weeks later there are less people buzzing about it then LAUNCH? NO WAI!!?!
If you're going to be sarcastic you should at least be accurate. After just 3 weeks of a major release activity should not be dropping. 13 weeks yes, but not 3 weeks.
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On August 22 2010 04:06 junkacc wrote: Precisely, you obviously don't know how stats work. The large sample size eliminates personal choices people make. ie) Like the reasons people have suggested here. Why don't you post on your actual account? This isn't a fucking war, you don't need to go undercover to spread your propaganda. No one's going to ban you for arguing against SC2, but seeing you randomly sniping at it from a fake name is getting really annoying. (oh look SC2 fails in Korea hur)
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Has xfire advertised LoL or LoL advertised xfire? If so, that would account for the statistics.
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On August 22 2010 05:09 Mannerheim wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 04:24 Nihilnovi wrote:On August 22 2010 00:47 shannn wrote: I always see ~1million people online on bnet at minimum (and that's at 12 pm-1am CET which shows my next argument). And I don't have xfire myself which a lot of other people don't have either. For me it just shows that the people with sc2 and xfire are playing less rather than implying it isn't showing a promising future for sc2. The "people online on b.net" accounts for WoW players as well. I would guesstimate at any given time there are 50k or so SC2 players online. There's about 40k SC2 games up right now. On average a game has more than 2 people in it. Add people who are playing single player or just idling in b.net. The claimed ~1M online at the moment isn't even enough to cover the saturday evening WoW players in EU. I don't think it accounts for WoW players.
I agree, it cannot possibly be accounting for WoW players as they certainly have at least several million online at any given time. Even in the weekends i've only seen the number go up to 1,250,000 players. I think that number is only for SC2, BW, and WC3.
As for the xfire stuff, sc2ranks has the ladder population at almost 1.2 million already, and keep in mind sc2ranks is only counting people who have been placed in a division. I've seen tons of people who only play custom games, these people wouldn't be included in SC2ranks tally, and I'm sure there's tons of people who are only interested in the campaign. http://www.sc2ranks.com/
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Most people who use xfire I wouldn't even count as gamers. Its such a bad program that anyone with any sense would not use it.
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People are funny.
Trying to convince themselves that it's a "bad omen" that less people are playing a game a month in to release, compared to release day.
It happens in EVERY game. The first few release days EVERYONE logs in. Then a couple weeks in, it hits a more normal trend.
Just look at SC1, WC, Diablo/D2, hell even WoW. They ALL start with a huge influx, slowly degrade to the "normal" trend, and then once things level out, they start slowly growing over time until the game ages.
Heck, WC3 a few weeks after release had a fraction of the player base they had a few weeks after Frozen Throne was released.
Haters need a reality check.
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In other news, broodwar is all the way down at #107.
Just sayin in response to the sc2 haters.
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On August 22 2010 00:56 junkacc wrote: This is a bad omen for SC2. No it's not, every game has a similar drop in popularity and some completely crash the week after release. This is extremely typical player drop as most people play single player finish and whatever
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On August 22 2010 06:17 Dionyseus wrote: I agree, it cannot possibly be accounting for WoW players as they certainly have at least several million online at any given time.
I guess we will never know until Blizzard confirms anything but I really doubt there are that many people playing concurrently at any one time in WoW.
Also before WoW was added to Bnet 2.0 in P2 of the beta, the avg amount of players playing SC2 concurrently was around 30-50k as I recall. Start of P2 saw that number shoot to ~1 million. Based on that alone it's highly probable that the current player count does in fact include WoW.
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I don't think any sane SC2 player uses XFire
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On August 22 2010 00:44 Assault_1 wrote: I dont understand why league of legends is played more than sc2
Because it's free and easy to play.
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On August 22 2010 07:19 FragKrag wrote: I don't think any sane SC2 player uses XFire
lol I don't get whats so bad about xfire :S I use it and I like it to chat with friends so I don't have to tab in game
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On August 22 2010 07:17 Ygz wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 06:17 Dionyseus wrote: I agree, it cannot possibly be accounting for WoW players as they certainly have at least several million online at any given time. Also before WoW was added to Bnet 2.0 in P2 of the beta, the avg amount of players playing SC2 concurrently was around 30-50k as I recall. Start of P2 saw that number shoot to ~1 million. Based on that alone it's highly probable that the current player count does in fact include WoW.
The reason for the big increase in phase 2 was that for the first time the counter was including games that aren't SC2, like BW and WC3.
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Seems natural. I'll relate it to my experience with another game: Halo. When I bought Halo three, I immediately played through the campaign, and then I played a bit of multiplayer, and then other games came out, and I stopped. Months later, with nothing left to play, I returned to Halo. This sort of thing happens frequently after a game is released and players decide that they do or don't like the multiplayer. Plus advertising and hype for the game is going down and so forth. It's nothing, really, to worry about.
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On August 22 2010 03:08 0mar wrote: Not really a big surprise. The casual players finished the SP game, played a couple games of MP and realized it's basically SC/BW in 3-D. What? And what is broodwar?
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I wouldn't read too much into this. Basically, when a game is released, people (almost everyone) play it for days on end and then gradually start playing less and less (unless you actually don't have anything else to do) until it's something they do "once in a while" to relax or whatever.
This, and then the fact that you had to stay online to play the campaign. A lot of people probably rushed through the campaign and then take a casual approach to matchmaking.
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Well, I for one tried it out, and then decided to hold off until I was ready to put some more time into it, balance changes, etc.
I'll be back.
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On August 22 2010 08:22 cocosoft wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 03:08 0mar wrote: Not really a big surprise. The casual players finished the SP game, played a couple games of MP and realized it's basically SC/BW in 3-D. What? And what is broodwar?
A difficult game with punishing gameplay and a high learning curve. Most people never reach the level where all the practice pays off.
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first of all, the data is from all xfire users playing the game, not data drawn from battle.net. second, xfire was bought by this titangaming thing so the xfiire numbers dropped quite a bit too, is my guess, obviously affecting the overall numbers and the fact that every game has the most users online in the first weeks after release
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Why is there even a discussion about this? Ofcourse there's going to be a spike on release. People buy the game, play it, find out it's not their cup of tea and that is that.
How is this a surprise?
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A lot of gamers on Xfire play a lot of different games. Most of them probably went back to CoD, CSS, ect.
They will probably play periodically, and when friends are on.
Also keep in mind a lot of people don't have Xfire. Me included.
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The summer fling with SC2 is coming to an end, when I logged onto xfire around release time all I saw was SC2 being played, it was being played by all my FPS and MMO friends - insane. Now I log in and I see them going back to their original games, only the RTS players are playing SC2 now.
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On August 22 2010 09:48 Rinrun wrote: The summer fling with SC2 is coming to an end, when I logged onto xfire around release time all I saw was SC2 being played, it was being played by all my FPS and MMO friends - insane. Now I log in and I see them going back to their original games, only the RTS players are playing SC2 now.
Which makes sense.
xfire is hardly a good way to track statistics.
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There have been many reports of xfire causing issues with SC2 (usually involving streaming), so that's no surprise.
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School has been starting so that's definitely got something to do with it.
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i dont even use xfire...most people might even have it off just to avoid any sort of problems arising during the game...
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On August 22 2010 00:52 Liquid`Tyler wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 00:46 G3nXsiS wrote: I think its just casual gamers who go into sc2 and finnish the campaign, try the multiplayer and get destroyed by the HUGE starcraft 1 fanbase and then decide that they are too far behind in skill level and just quit. The matchmaking isn't that bad. Most people win around 50% of their matchmaking games. The people at the very very bottom of the ladder, who account for a very small minority, have significantly below 50%, just as the people at the very very top of the ladder have significantly above 50%.
Yeah thats true but I think its also because people see theres a huge learning curve in starcraft and many people are unwilling to put in alot of time into that.
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Xfire means nothing honestly.
It's all just a bunch of kids playing WoW/FPS games
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So who is playing SC2? The Nobel laureates?
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On August 22 2010 02:25 junkacc wrote: You guys:
a) don't know how statistics work b) are in denial
You didn't read my post obviously.
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Even if that trend was indicative of teh larger SC2 player base, only Blizzard know that for certain, its neither unusual nor something to worry about.
There's almost always a rush when something new is released followed by a tapering off period, it doesn't necessarily mean that lots of people have given up on SC2 (or whatever) just that they've worked it in amongst their other games, most likely after powering through the campaign and placement matches.
The normal cycle for products (I tried to draw a graph as an example but it sucked so apologies for the lack of visual aid here) is for a large pick-up to begin with followed by a significant fall, then another, smaller pick-up and stabalisation. Exception here are if the product tanks, or an extraodinary occurence (World of Warcraft is a good example here, didn't taper off just went up and up).
Besides, SC2 is not a short term project, Blizz obviously intend for it to be around a long time so figures over such a short period are not a cause for concern, its the figures between now and the release of the first expansion that will be significant.
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Most of those guys probably pirated the game anyway... Even the poor man's version didn't kill piracy last I heard here in Brazil, only the true nerds got ahold of either US or EU clients and we're not that many. Then again with that awful localization... But I digress, most of these people probably never logged into bnet to start with and just played their sad offline modes for a while.
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Isn't school starting up around this time, here and there around the world? Could imagine that being the cause.
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On August 22 2010 00:43 Piski wrote:Not sure if this has been posted here before. Friend of mine just pointed out to me that SC2 online game statistics from xfire don't show very positive future for SC2. It's rapidly dropping which of course isn't good. ![[image loading]](http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/3434/sc2fail.png) Is this just the casual players doing the sp, trying the mp and then moving on or is there something to be worried about? Or is there just something I'm missing about the stat graph. There are not much information on how the statistics are calculated so this maybe a bogus info but I thought I would post it if someone can clarify on it. The link to the xfire page: http://www.xfire.com/games/sc2/StarCraft_II/
Update: 5 Months after release
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I played for like 20 hours on the first 2 days. I haven't touched the game more than twice since.....not a melee type of player, just played for the SP. Custom maps haven't grown enough for me to take it over WC3.
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Interesting update to the thread. Seems to me that the spikes are at weekends?
And the average has dropped down to 20k, while being 75k'ish 5 months ago. Damn.
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Braavos36374 Posts
This is only for xfire right? Do people even use that site a lot? They don't seem to be much more of a popular site than TL, unless I'm missing something. It's kind of like saying "Modern Warfare playtime is declining rapidly! Future doesn't look bright! Statistics from TeamLiquid.net."
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I have many gamer friends and only ONE of them actually uses xfire. And he plays like 20 diff games so he's constantly switching around.
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On December 13 2010 12:51 Hot_Bid wrote: This is only for xfire right? Do people even use that site a lot? They don't seem to be much more of a popular site than TL, unless I'm missing something. It's kind of like saying "Modern Warfare playtime is declining rapidly! Future doesn't look bright! Statistics from TeamLiquid.net." that made me lol edit: and i mean i actually ha ha ha'd that shit.
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I wouldn't expect people to use Xfire with SC2. I used it in Call of Duty because I needed it to follow people around and talk with those in different servers. Don't really need that with SC2. I just don't see it as any sort of reliable data source that has any sort of impact on anything.
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Probably because cataclysm came out Ive gone from playing 6hours a day sc2 to 6hours a day Cata until ive got my char settled back in at the new max level (id had fullwrath since early july)
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Even if those are meaningful statistics we don't really know what it means without comparing to other games (and there's no other game you can really compare to, since the only other really big 'e-sport' game is BW and that wasn't an e-sport on release).
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I like how you are all defending sc2 as some white light as if it is supposed to be the most played game on the planet !!! Its a very boring game from a spectators POV, and its a boring game from a technical POV. Ive been saying this for a long time, but how easy this game is takes away from its potential to reach an audience. No longer is it as intricate as chess with the dexterity of a piano, now its more like as intricate as checkers, and takes the dexterity of a harmonica. Rather bland and diluted.
Not to mention these statistics show a 75% drop off since release, as if that wasnt to be expected from north american culture to begin with.
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Braavos36374 Posts
Yeah I'm closing this because the statistics are useless if taken from xfire.
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