Poll: Do you use Steam to access DDO? < Player Count Estimate >

[Sam-u-r-eye]

DDO steam charts.
LOTRO steam charts.

[Sam-u-r-eye]

reserved* will update with the quick maaaaaafs
if we can break 60 people

Tell your friends/guildies to vote!

EDIT:

It appears DDO has a peak concurrent players (across all servers) of about 4200 people at the moment. Lotro is at about 3X our population, so they're at about 12000 concurrent players.

Dark Age of Camelot (an even older MMO) has about the same concurrent players as DDO and they're continuing forward in good health. Thankfully our resources are tied in part to LOTRO but our content updates, engine, and UI is behind LOTRO's now by a bit. We will probably get "Asheron's Called" at some point, i.e., we will be abandoned due to technology problems that come with aging.

If the new LOTR mmo that Amazon is financing kills LOTRO then it will also kill our game, likely, since our development is tied to LOTRO's continued success.

In Fall of 2009 World of Warcraft had 731,000 peak concurrent players and 11,550,000 subscriptions. (A subscription is required to play WOW.)

This means that for every peak concurrent player there were about 15.8 other players not playing.

If we use the same fraction of 'peak concurrent user' to 'active player' then DDO has 67,200 players, and LOTRO has 201,600 'active players.'

link for data

[Sam-u-r-eye]

from the steam charts we can see that LOTRO has roughly 3X the playerbase as us.

[FlavoredSoul]

Poll Doesn't have an option for using both the Steam and Standalone Clients so I put yes.

[Loholt-UK]

Poll Doesn't have an option for using both the Steam and Standalone Clients so I put yes.

Yes was probably the right one to pick as you will appear on the Steam stats somewhere.

[Loholt-UK]

from the steam charts we can see that LOTRO has roughly 3X the playerbase as us.

LOTRO has 3x the playerbase who log in via Steam. I think the O/P is trying to understand this data better by asking a related question. I'll be interested to see his conclusions.

[Enoach]

keeping in mind the sample for this poll will be based on players that utilize the DDO forums. Not all players use the forums for various reasons.

[Sam-u-r-eye]

keeping in mind the sample for this poll will be based on players that utilize the DDO forums. Not all players use the forums for various reasons.

I agree. Those reasons (or people) would have to significantly overlap with the people who use (or don't use) steam. Personally, I didn't use the steam client for 4 years, but started about a year ago to consolidate my games "visually." I don't think new players would be more or less likely to use steam. I don't think vets would be more or less likely to use steam. What other criteria would we sort by?

[Enoach]

I agree. Those reasons (or people) would have to significantly overlap with the people who use (or don't use) steam. Personally, I didn't use the steam client for 4 years, but started about a year ago to consolidate my games "visually." I don't think new players would be more or less likely to use steam. I don't think vets would be more or less likely to use steam. What other criteria would we sort by?

I was being polite to those who no longer have permission from SSG to use these forums as well as those that simply don't use forums.

[Sam-u-r-eye]

I was being polite to those who no longer have permission from SSG to use these forums as well as those that simply don't use forums.

I feel ya dude

[nokowi]

In 2016, Steam is averaging 14 million concurrent users per day at peak — that’s up from 8.4 million in 2015.

If you don't expect the fraction of DDO players on steam to grow significantly differently than other games, you would divide the DDO players by total steam population to determine net gain or loss of players in DDO.

The best way to get approx steam usage would be to divide the max steam players (in the past) by DDO server capacity and set an upper limit for population and steam percentage.


Using July 2012 data:
If the max server pop is 500 and there are 8 servers,

1368 peak divided by 8 servers x (500max) = max of 33% of players on steam

Lower limit is 849/4000 = 21% of players on steam

[Memnir]

Nope.

[HungarianRhapsody]

If you don't expect the fraction of DDO players on steam to grow significantly differently than other games, you would divide the DDO players by total steam population to determine net gain or loss of players in DDO.

That's an awfully big "if" there.

I don't see any reason to expect that DDO would have the same growth/shrinkage that Steam in general has.

[nokowi]

That's an awfully big "if" there.

I don't see any reason to expect that DDO would have the same growth/shrinkage that Steam in general has.

I agree, but the point is that growth in steam use can cause an increase in DDO usage on steam without a corresponding increase in DDO player population. SOME of this would certainly be expected as more people migrate to steam.

Conclusions are only as good as assumptions, and I haven't made any conclusions. I'm pointing out the key factors to consider, and using the nearly doubling of steam usage from 2015 to 2016 to show this increase in steam usage could be important to any conclusions. How you interpret this is a bigger factor than the change in average players shown by the OP.

[Renvar]

In 2016, Steam is averaging 14 million concurrent users per day at peak — that’s up from 8.4 million in 2015.

If you don't expect the fraction of DDO players on steam to grow significantly differently than other games, you would divide the DDO players by total steam population to determine net gain or loss of players in DDO.

The best way to get approx steam usage would be to divide the max steam players (in the past) by DDO server capacity and set an upper limit for population and steam percentage.


Using July 2012 data:
If the max server pop is 500 and there are 8 servers,

1368 peak divided by 8 servers x (500max) = max of 33% of players on steam

Lower limit is 849/4000 = 21% of players on steam

That’s way more difficult and subjective than it needs to be. If steam shows 270 concurrent logins on average and the forum poll shows that roughly 10% of the ddo players use steam then you could suggest that the game has 2700 concurrent players on average. With 7 servers (ignoring wayfinder) that would come out to just under 400 per server. Which is not far off from who panel snapshots people have used in the past as a gauge.

But that would assume the forum poll was accurate of the forum population and that the forum population is representative of the game population. I’m not sure either of those are true.

Without knowing steam demographics and how they compare to ddo demographics and steam player behavior trends you are hard pressed to say more than the steam numbers are representative of the steam players.

[nokowi]

That’s way more difficult and subjective than it needs to be. If steam shows 270 concurrent logins on average and the forum poll shows that roughly 10% of the ddo players use steam then you could suggest that the game has 2700 concurrent players on average. With 7 servers (ignoring wayfinder) that would come out to just under 400 per server. Which is not far off from who panel snapshots people have used in the past as a gauge.

But that would assume the forum poll was accurate of the forum population and that the forum population is representative of the game population. I’m not sure either of those are true.

Without knowing steam demographics and how they compare to ddo demographics and steam player behavior trends you are hard pressed to say more than the steam numbers are representative of the steam players.

Take that up with the OP, who is trying to use the data we do have to do something.

Steam data (involuntary data over a period of time) should be more accurate than forum data from a voluntary poll at one fixed point in time.

[MipedianScout]

Take that up with the OP, who is trying to use the data we do have to do something.

Steam data (involuntary data over a period of time) should be more accurate than forum data from a voluntary poll at one fixed point in time.

I'm fine with having polls and discussions. That's what forums are for. I think we all know that we are trying to approximate something because actual numbers needed are unavailable.

Both Forum data and Steam data are flawed in that neither is large enough percentage of the population and neither is representative of the population.

Steam data is only accurate at showing how many players are using steam to play DDO at any point in time. As you mentioned, it cannot be correlated easily to DDO player population. Trends on steam may or may not correlate to the overall game.

That doesn't mean it isn't interesting to discuss.

[Vish]

I have heard that steam is invasive,
And I've had bad experiences with it
So I will not use it anymore

[nokowi]

I'm fine with having polls and discussions. That's what forums are for. I think we all know that we are trying to approximate something because actual numbers needed are unavailable.

Both Forum data and Steam data are flawed in that neither is large enough percentage of the population and neither is representative of the population.

Steam data is only accurate at showing how many players are using steam to play DDO at any point in time. As you mentioned, it cannot be correlated easily to DDO player population. Trends on steam may or may not correlate to the overall game.

That doesn't mean it isn't interesting to discuss.

In the real world, people use flawed data to make valid conclusions.

Some are more capable of doing so than others. The steam data can if fact be numerically linked to what it does or does not show.

Comparing max steam participation with max server population gives an estimate of magnitude of steam players.

Comparing typical server counts (players counted when you log in) to typical steam counts also gives an indication.

Suggesting steam players have completely different patterns is ridiculous. Of course what they do correlates to the overall game. Maybe not exactly, but to some degree. Maybe enough to learn something if you don't outright disregard all data because it is not perfect.

Polls only need about 5% of population to form pretty accurate trends. That is of course from a representative sample. If something like 25% of players are on steam, that's going to be fairly representative just because of the magnitude of players there, and their inability to opt in or out of data collection. The forums is a far less representative sample, both in much smaller numbers and in needing to opt in to data collection.

[Yamani]

Really interesting to see the changes in the %gain.

Most notables:
16% gain December(2017)- Mist of Ravenloft Expansion.
8.7% loss May(2018)-Think this is U38 patch 1. Which was the daily dice change.
3.7% loss August(2018)- U39 patch 1. Bug fixes and /stuck changed.
3.4% gain Septermber(2018)-U39 patch 2. Kensai change/Melee Survivability patch.
6.1% gain October (2018)= U40: Killing time, wood elf, night revels, monk nerf.

Based off this City of Sharn might be a decent boost too! Of course them advertising more might be part of the gains. Since they said they had a ad campaign going atm.