Vana'dielian Population Tops Two Million! (04/22/2009)

[Takedown3]

how is this even possible with the amount of bannings that happen every month

[ringthree]

That's very well possible. But when you look at the numbers and then compare it to even one server's population, someone may think things do not add up. Is population in terms of accounts or characters made? Do they count accounts that are under disciplinary measures (ie banned/suspended)? Do they count de-activated accounts/character IDs? You could continue generating questions about the population, but that doesn't prevent a PR notice from pulling a magical statistic out of their ass and not providing the underlying info on how they came to the assessment.

EDIT: And this is the part where I shake my fist at Frenzy for beating me to the punch.

These are all good questions, but by any measure the game is getting larger and more populated. Even if people are just making more mules or whatever the case may be. After 6 years of service I wouldn't expect to hit any kind of increasing population milestone.

Whatever the measure that they want to use, the population is increasing. It is definitely not active accounts, we all know that just by doing a /sea all and multiplying by the number of servers. But WoW's 10+ million players aren't all logged in at the same time either.

It's a surprising stat no matter how the measurement came about.

[Acturus]

how is this even possible with the amount of bannings that happen every month

If they are a competent business, RMT groups factor in the cost of replacement accounts into their profit margins, or used to, at least. With the free trial accounts, it's easier than ever to join "the adventuring world of Vana'diel."

[The Stig]

Town gear.

Damn, touche.

[Pikarya]

Town gear.

lold fuckin hard

[Devolver]

It's a surprising stat no matter how the measurement came about.

This is basically the kicker here. And people saying this is because of the bonanza, that may be, but there was a bonanza last year too.

I'm actually pretty impressed.

[Aidin]

I don't see any Galka in that picture.

[Aksannyi]

I am 11/2,000,000 of the population.

How insignificant I am. :/

[Kipling]

This is maybe the first time I see a picture on the official site that shows what seems to be actual players.

That's what I was thinking lol. I loved how when they showed pictures from the expansions it was always players in full mnk af1 or rdm af1. And I think for ToAU they had a full Koenig PLD. x.x

[Reapz]

I am 2/2,000,000!

[spooky]

1/2000000 go me

[BerenTebogo]

This is maybe the first time I see a picture on the official site that shows what seems to be actual players.

And they're gimp.

[hypnotizd]

I want to see their report after bonanza for how many active characters there are. I activated 11 more content IDs for that crap.

[Xno Kappa]

I hope I win again this year lol. 2 million gil and Homam pants was pretty hawt last year. Got 9 characters activated for it.

[sunvision]

4/2000000 here.....

But I can't seem to get the logic of why SE is interested in posting this info....

[Charismatic]

morale, dawg, morale.

[Mizango]

6/2000000 up in here.....

[Seibar]

2/2m if they only counted toons with levels and rank.
9/2m if they count anything with playtime/active but level 5 (bonanaza!!)

but ya, either way this is pretty impressive. I'm assuming they aren't counting all the bonanza mules and this comes from a census-style count.

[Qtipus]

I'd be more interested in how many unique payment methods were processed each month against the number of accounts and average number of content IDs per account. That would probably be a stronger indication of the game's health overall, but this is certainly a little surprising considering last census they had stated 500,000 accounts without mentioning the number of active characters that I could find.

[ringthree]

And they're gimp.

Looks pretty much like Odin's AH 90% of the time. XD