Population decline: slow and gradual or fell off a cliff?

Meat was sampling about 1k per server

Flav wrote on Mar 21^st, 2014 at 2:01am:

So they only count character logins once for the same individual toon per day?

Rubbinns wrote on Mar 21^st, 2014 at 2:05am:


No, At a guess it's the number of query the gls.ddo.com server receive for a token based on account credentials.

So each time you have to enter your password it counts as a login. Swapping toon doesn't count.
Restarting launcher to clear the memory leak does count. Restarting the launcher after a crash does count.

Er... that'd mean that it's at most half that number.

Everyone needs to log in twice to actually play the game.

NOTSunnyshadow wrote on Mar 21^st, 2014 at 2:25am:


Not everybody needs to log twice... I don't need for example. ( unless I'm on Wifi on my professional laptop at my parent home )

Now a DDO server was never able to hold many people... From what I gather each server can carry something like between 5K and 10K people online at the same time.  ( note : these numbers are Wild Assed Guesses based on 7 years of DDO and some hints given long ago in Europe )

Except in the first year or so DDO never had a huge population.
We have to accept ( and Turbine has to accept ) that DDO is a niche game for a niche player population and we ( both us and Turbine ) have to stop trying to compete with things like WoW that cater to the masses.

sploitssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

taste like candy

You have to define active players.

My guess is that Maj's 20k is an arbitrary number which is close to something that is important to the bean counters. (I have done sales and CR at many companies, we know roughly how many 'valued' customers we were serving at any given time). In this case 20k is roughly somewhere between 18k and 22k accounts which spent money and my guess is the number of individuals were defined as having spent over $100 with turbine in a year.

That number doesn't mean a whole lot for the books, but gives employees a feel for how many people they are trying to keep happy and entertained on any given day.

My $100 number is based on what a year round VIP sub costs. USD of course.

And yes 20k individuals spending over a $100 can definitely still make servers feel empty. I know many players who buy an expansion, or logs on and drops $60 every few months but only plays for three days at a time and then go on hiatus for another three months.

I'd have a real hard time believing there are more than 10k players logged in on a given day. I know donuts is the vault's cowboyneal but I had to go with exploits.

NOTdarth wrote on Mar 21^st, 2014 at 3:25am:


New Generation of Vaulties, what did you expect? 

Persiflage wrote on Mar 21^st, 2014 at 5:31am:


This.

I suspect it's a bit higher than 20k, but lower than 200k. But there's far fewer hard core play every day types. I know my playtime has lessened significantly in the last year or so - lucky if I log in once a week on average. The readings during the card event will skew of course, but if that's stats from prior to the event, it's probably evened out.

Depends how you define an active account, I guess.

NOTdarth wrote on Mar 21^st, 2014 at 3:25am:


Everyone is on a health kick these days, and out of the 20000 there are only a handful paladins that don't like exploits

I play a lot, but I didn't spend a penny for over a year. I guess paying (in one way or the other) players are what counts for turbine anyway. 20k may be an exact nummber for that, but I guess there are a lot more freeloaders.