Some data on Age of Conan European servers population

Age of Conan Primetime population, 1-3 July 2008 (Europe)
Inserito originariamente da Abriael

On June the 30th Funcom published a quite boastful press release, sporting numbers pointing to 700000 accounts created on Age of Conan. What funcom (conveniently?) failed to show, was the number of accounts that were renewed after the first free month.

It isn't a mistery that Age of Conan suffers from several problems, many of which seem, at least to me and many others, quite gamebreaking, expecially now that i'm level 80 and i reached the "endgame". Quite a lot of people seem to be quitting the game, for good or to come back at a later time, and the lack of Funcom's feedback about retained accounts seem to confirm this trend.
In the world of PR, any number that a company doesn't boast is quite probably a number such company doesn't want people to see.

Xfire provides hard data on the minutes played by the users of their service (8000 of which play AoC each day, making for a very viable statistical value), and shows that such numbers, even if bumpy, have been reduced to less than half since launch, and show a quite constant sinking trend.

Since at level 80 my free time suddenly inflated, I decided to poll some numbers myself, not on total population (that would be impossible without official data), but on what really concerns the active player, the number of characters online at the same time during primetime (in addition to that i made a chart on the popularity of each ruleset). A number that can make or break a community and (if too low) can ultimately force people to throw in the recycle bin characters that costed them a lot of time and effort, but give them no more fun while playing in a desert.

Unfortunately Funcom made it quite difficult to gather this kind of data. The limit of characters available to each account is excessively low (and common to all servers), and for some absolutely obscure reason players lower than level 5 can't access the character search function (and there's no total number displayed, so one has to count the pages). This means that polling each server takes around 15-20 minutes, and the character needs to be canceled imediately after to make room for the next.

The data you'll find in this article has been polled by creating a character in each european server of Age of Conan, reaching level 5 to access the search player function and doing a search for players of levels 1-80. The pages have been counted and multiplied by 50 (there are 50 characters per page in the list) and then the characters on the last pages have been manually counted and added to the total.

The polling was done between July the 1st and July the 3rd, 2008, in a timeframe included between 6.30 PM and 9 PM CET to make sure that the data is consistent enough.

Of course the statistical value of the data is debatable, but should give a pretty good idea of the number of characters logged in each server during primetime, to identify which servers have an high population and which turned into ghost towns.

As you can see from the table and the graphs there are some pretty evident conclusion to be made:
While there are a few servers that have an healthy population of over 2000 people there's only one that still surpasses the 3000 people online at the same time. the 36% of servers have a pretty average population between 1000 and 2000 concurrent players, that the ones that played lot of MMORPG will identify as pretty shaky (just to make an example that isn't the usual WoW, most Final Fantasy XI servers in the first couple years after the american release very rarely went below the 3000 players online during primetime).
The most discouraging data, though, comes from the very high percentage of servers that are plagued by a very low concurrent population (under 1000). They represent a whopping 44% of the total. Even more discouraging if we consider that the 16% of the servers (4) fail to reach 500 (actually they fail to reach even 300) people logged in at the same time: basically the gamers playing in 11 servers between the 25 available face a population problems that can make playing and finding people to actually do something quite a feat by Itself.

Personally I play on Hyrkania, that totals around 600 players online during primetime, and believe me, it can get really awkward. As one of the VERY few level 80 active guardian (a class that's absolutely needed to tank any kind of high level PvE content), i can easily see how much people struggle to find one to help turn their evenings into something fun.
And this is during primetime, outside of it the server turns into an absolutely silent desert.
It's truly sad to see that in so many servers players have to face the same situation.

Now, on to more general considerations, the grand total of players online during primetime isn't THAT bad, being a bit beyond 30000, but still it's definately a lot less than what a MMORPG as hyped as AoC should have.
The french and the german communities seem to be a little more solid than the international one sporting only 3 underpopulated server (that include the least populated one, Stryx) 5 with an average population and the healthy Ishtar, and it's pretty evident that AoC completely failed to penetrate the spanish market.

Some may try to dispute this data by telling that we are in summer, and numbers are bound to dwindle, but an experienced MMO player would know that such decreasing is normally almost negligible until the second half of july, since while some people go on vacation, many use their summer time to actually play more, moreover, 11 servers under 1000 players online max? This is summer, not a nuclear war.

Is this an absolute disaster for Funcom? Given the total numbers, maybe not yet, AoC probably still has the potential to make them a good penny, but they obviously greatly overestimated ther ability to retain population, and as such the number of servers to divide such population in. They need to take action fast, by improving the pretty sad development status of their game, improving their communication and the efficency of their patching, by finally activateing buddy codes (at least for the underpopulated servers), and ultimately by beginning to think about the first server merges. And yes, That would be bad press for them so early after release, but they 'll have to chose between pleasing the press or protecting the enjoyment of many of their players (that pay their salaries). For me, the choice is pretty easy, but what will they do?

Of course you're completely encouraged to do your own polling (given that you're willing to spend some effort in overriding all the obstacles set by Funcom to this kind of operation) and compare, I would personally be pleased to see some data relative to the american servers.





EDIT: The thread about the data I gathered on the official european server has been closed on sight and labeled as "flamebait" this morning as soon as one overzaelous moderator logged in, despite the effort by many posters, me included, to keep the conversation civil and the low level (compared to many other threads) of flames included in it. I would like to personally thank the ones that discussed the matter in a civil way and made this effort meaningful with their comments.
Too bad that Funcom thinks that censoring anything that isn't labeled as "great news" might be the policy to pursue. I honestly expected more maturity on their part.
Truly sad.

EDIT2: Another user tried to open a thread to comment on the aforementioned act of "overzaelous moderation", as shown in the third comment to this post. Unfortunately further censorship occurred, while his post has been instantly canceled and he received an infraction.