Eladiun wrote on Sep 19
th, 2011 at 9:58am:
Two things.
1) Less than 10% of the player base reads the forums.
2) Those gripping were a vocal minority of that 10%
I know. It just surprises me how often peole are amazed/astounded/shocked/appalled/whatever by the fact that Turbine does not respond to their threats to quit, drop their sub, or otherwise throw a tantrum hissy-fit on the forums about whatever rules change or pricing change or release issue occurs.
It also surprises me how often people actually like to take credit for changes in game or in policy from a forum thread or post or whatever. Guess what, people, they really don't give a fuck.
They know how many active players they have. They can tell in a split second how many user accounts have/have not logged on in the last week. And they trend it heavily. Probably down to the half hour.
And they know how many accounts: 1) even have a forum account associated. 2) have logged in with that forum account in the past month. 3) have bothered to post anything in the last month. 4) have posted something negative.
My (completely uneducated and probably wrong)guess is:
1) 50%
2) 10%
3) 3%
4) .5%
Now guess what percentage of Turbine's revenue comes from that .5%. It might be disproportionate. It might be as much as 5%. Which would be huge. But even so, it's a drop in the bucket. And that .5% are mostly ADDICTED to the game. They might piss and moan, but by and large, they aren't actually going anywhere.
Like I said, the actual numbers probably vary from the above, but the ratio of premium/VIP game players (Revenue generators) to forum bitchers is probably on the scale of 300:1. Maybe worse.