Hi again, everyone! I was just wondering about how many people play EQ2 these days. Does anyone have any idea? And I'm not talking about how many accounts or how many subscribers per-se, but more about active player numbers. I'm just wondering how populated this game is in comparison to some of the other MMOs I play like RuneScape (~10 million active accounts), LOTRO (I read there's ~500k active accounts on this game), Rift (I read they have several million active accounts), etc. I've tried games like World of Warcraft, but this game feels much more populated. Same with Rift and LOTRO. Of course, RS was my first MMO so I'm sort of biased towards it, but EQ2 is quickly becoming a close runner-up to RS in my book.
LOTRO is dying. I am a lifer there, and it is depressing how Turbine has been killing their own game. But I still play it, and hope that someday they will get some sense back and the game will get fun again. I highly doubt that 500k active accounts is right for LOTRO, as Turbine will not say any numbers for server population or such. I see a lot more active players in EQ2 than I have seen in LOTRO. that's for sure...
The only people that know with 100% certainty are the ones that work for SOE. Even pulling data from census isn't 100% accurate because a) not all players share their data with census, and b) afaik, you can pull the count of unique character IDs (that share their data with census) that log in during a given time period, but you can't generate the count of accounts (with at least one character sharing data with census) that log in during that same time period. (Feldon can probably give you more information about what can be done with the data from census. He is the one that runs EQ2U.)
I was bored one Saturday afternoon so I started doing /who all <class> where I'd start sticking in class names. It seemed like most classes had 10-20 who showed up. That's all. As the average per class was around ~15 that gives ~400 on the server not counting who are anon, RP, whatever. It certainly explained why I keep seeing the same people over and over. Since the vast majority of random people I see in-game are NOT RP or anon I doubt that introduces a very big error by not counting them. You can make wild guesses of what fraction of people actively playing would actually log on whenever you do such a thing and make the appropriate multiplication, but it looks to me like the population has taken a dive. As I know of several people who have pretty much stopped playing in anticipation of EQN I guess it makes sense. Personally, I was very surprised. I'd always envisioned servers as having thousands of people online, especially on a weekend. Guess not. From those numbers I am very doubtful there are 100,000 active players. MAYBE 30-40K. Maybe. P.S. There were an aweful lot of shadowknights.
Some games never die...Turbine's 1st game Asheron's Call still has diehard fans after all these years.
I like lotro, but it's like 1000 times more expensive cause they charge you for every single expansion ever released, and then you have to pay extra to instances, skirmishes, quests... blabla... but it's a beautiful game with nice quests...
From this thread https://forums.station.sony.com/eq2...ervers-nearly-empty-24-7.543577/#post-6011836 Characters logged in within the last 3 months: Antonia Bayle: 63,028 Freeport: 57,003 Everfrost: 46,180 Unrest: 44,063 Crushbone: 41,108 Oasis: 40,558 Guk: 39,037 Permafrost: 38,994 Butcherblock: 37,678 Valor (DE): 35,836 Splitpaw (UK): 29,123 Nagafen (PvP): 24,908 Barren Sky (RU): 16,845 Storms (FR): 9,855 Harla Dar (RU PvP): 6,805 Sebilis (JP): 6,576 Roughly 500,000 characters, although that could be from < 100,000 accounts
I don't think /who all class is a very good indication of players online. The majority of players on my friends list are set to anon and/or rp so they wouldn't show. All my toons are also. It's a bit like doing a who all, seeing 100, and thinking there's only 100 players online. We all know that is fiddlesticks! Anywho, we can guess all we like, but with Vesspyr generally having up to 2-3 zones open, there's more players online that what we can see. So my guess, around 300k, which is calculated using nothing more than cabbages and coal.
EQ2 is free to play and therefore players don't feel obligated to log in. Those that do regularly, love the game. The more populated servers are Freeport and Antonia Bayle. I've seen more new players in recent months than in a while, but as usual other new games start up like Everquest Landmark and Elder Scrolls Online. People will drift away to new games for a while, but usually the game butterflies come back.
You are crazy if you think this game has over 150K players. Even 100K is probably a stretch. The name Everquest was once the most popular MMO at one time, now it is not even in the top 20. Popularity obviously does not equal to quality, but that much of a drop is just ridiculous and cannot be defended. Number 1 to not top 5, not top 10, not top 15, or even top 20.........
Hmm. but how many players in some of the popular MMOs are the type that go from MMO to MMO, easily bored and not really spending that much to support the games? A lot of EQ and EQ2 players are long time players and still very into the game, whether it be house decorating, role playing, casual or group instances/raiding?
It's probably less than 100,000 active accounts, yeah. There are quite a few people I know who've got more than five alts they log into, especially since FTP kicked in.
Well OP, I technically have active accounts in LOTRO & Rift but I haven't logged on either for more than a couple of minutes in months. I also technically have two WOW accounts, one of them their free whatever it is to 20. I don't even have that game on my computer anymore and haven't for months. I also have accounts for several other games (I think they've all gone F2P now if they didn't start out that way) and I haven't played those either in a couple of years in some cases. None of them on are my computer anymore. So the numbers like that will always be skewed. They only people who really know the numbers are the people who count the money and they aren't going to give numbers that make their game look bad. We can all sit here and speculate about how many people are actively playing here, but no one has the real numbers except SOE. All we can really do with complete confidence is say which servers seem to have healthy populations (Freeport, Antonia Bayle both seem pretty crowded to me and Everfrost is pretty good population wise imo, I'm sure others are as well but these are the servers I play on).
All mmorpg forums have a thread with this subject popping up once in a while, and in all respect, the debate is irrelevant in the aspect of you will never know the number. Maybe a little harsh two way to see it. Of course it's more fun with 10.000 peeps than 5 and the game will be maintained by vendor if they still come out with +cash on top when taxes and all expenses have been subtracted. I came from wow and trust me - having 7 mill +/- 1mill subs is NOT fun, cause the servers are overcrowded, community goes rotten and quest items + materials for crafting gets hell to grind. So all in all - I would like more peeps on Permafrost, but I actually also like the fact that grinding mats, collectibles goes fast and general chat are not filled trolls and I will *beep* your momma jokes. I prefer a good balance - as for now - it is a bit to quiet. Maybe merging a few servers would be an idea in near future? (edit) /move this thread to Zones & Populations forum perhaps?
Not to mention trying to log on to the server and not being able to because it's full. Sitting there watching the # go down...you're 3251 in the queue.
Yeah, right now fwiw, I feel AB has a pretty good population. I worry too much more and we'd have servers smoking and crashing. I can't speak to the other servers as I don't play on them, so admittedly my view of the topic is quite limited. From what I can tell though, AB seems to have raiding and grouping at pretty brisk levels, our newly published house area on the leaderboards always has a fair number added on weekly, and the channels I listen in on are hopping right along... and yet I don't feel lost in the sea of people. I recognize by name a fair number of folks, and that's a nice feeling. I don't think I'd want a "bigger" server population. I appreciate the ability to wave at folks and say hi, when I'm doing errands in qeynos or halas. I played lotro as well, and AB feels every bit as populated as that did.
Freeport's VI servers regularly crash and burn. It's was common to see VI & VI 3 as options to zone in....now VI 2 seems to be back as an option, so maybe part of the bugginess has been fixed.
Most excellent, thanks for that info! And I'll bet you'd be surprised how few people play other MMOs in comparison: EQ2 is one of the more popular ones. WoW is first with 7 million players (even having lost another 7 million over the last couple years), then FF XIV is second (they claim over a million paying customers right now), and Eve Online is third with over 500,000 accounts (but most players have multiple accounts there and they give discounts for multiple subs). Probably Guild Wars 2 would be next after that. And then it really drops off. Among Tera, Aion, Rift, LoTRO, Neverwinter, STO, CO, DC Universe Online, Age of Conan, The Secret World, Allods, Dark Age of Camelot and D & D Online I'd imagine Everquest 2 is holding up pretty well. Maybe Tera would be the only one with more players than EQ2 out of those, and Tera NA is only a couple years old if that.
