<div id="post_message_574657"> Quote:
Originally Posted by Lhon
I suspect those who voted "No" fall into two camps: those that are happy with their current game and aren't interested in trying any new game, and those that are/were in the Vanguard beta.


Perhaps some of those in the early phases of beta -- we did start very early and ran the risk of some people's expectations being thrown out of whack. But beta 3 is moving along very nicely with neglible churn and also something I've never seen before: in EQ 1, we peaked around 7-10pm pst. Other than those hours, the population was down about half.

With Vanguard we still peak during those hours with 1500+ on at the moment (and it's still under populated, and we still don't have Kojan up), but at the same time it never really drops below 800 or so, not even at 8am Sunday morning. People just play and play. Part of this is because we made a very real effort to invite people from all over the world, but that's really only part of it. I've logged on at all sorts of crazy hours and talked to people and the hours they are putting into playing and testing are truly unprecedented, at least from my experience.

While some people may say I'm crazy, with all of the new MMOG players out there looking for something new, something with more challenge, longevity, and an incredible seamless world to explore, combined with all of the old school folk who are looking for the next EQ (keep in mind we have over 115,000 people registered on our boards, and that up until recently was only from viral marketing). Also, over 2 million people have tried EQ and while they're obviously not all playing now (though the game is still going very strong for being 7 years old and not being designed for logevity in terms of how the economy works, etc.). Then add in all of the people WoW has brought to the gamespace, who likely would never have tried an MMOG (which has helped this immeasurably, but also helped us big time too).

So just doing some simple math, I think we'll easily hit 500,000 subscribers in a year, and then keep growing from there as we have content, mechanics, lore, and even technology planned out for 7 years.

Weiterlesen...