Saturday 26 February 2011

Rift: are there a million players already?

Regarding population the guess on the official forums is 12,000 per server. However we don't know whether numbers are throttled because of the population being so dense in the starter areas. Since 12k * 39 is almost half a million, then the EU servers probably have similar numbers to the US ones that seems a bit high, almost a million playing before the game's even launched. It must be much more than 1,000 however as some servers have had queues of well over 1,000 and presumably most of those people eventually get in. 2268 is the highest queue position I've seen reported so far.

If it's not being throttled and the servers are all close to full already that makes 39 * 12,000 players on the North American servers, 468, 000. And a similar number on the EU servers.

It certainly wouldn't surprise me if there were a million players. The statistic they've given is two-edged. They've said that a million accounts have registered for the forums and people have been quick to point out that some of them won't have bought the game. However most people who play MMOs DON'T register for forums, there may be just as many people playing without registering on the boards as there are customers who registered on the boards but didn't pre-order.

2 comments:

  1. I'm pretty sure that the number they gave are Trion accounts, which are required to play the game, whether or not you ever post on the forums. (EU requirements may vary.) This would include:

    A) People who have actually pre-ordered, who might be playing currently

    B) People who applied for one or more of the betas (including the open beta)

    C) People who wanted to troll the forums back before that required a purchase

    My guess is that they will press release it when they get to a million actual sales.

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  2. The only reason not to press release it would be if they are struggling to cope with the influx.

    I suspect they're a bit worried about launch. We have no idea if the actual launch will match the pre-order popularity. They won't really want another day like Friday in terms of the servers although of course they'll be delighted so many are flooding in.

    I'm guessing they won't try to push things now, they'll just ride the wave as it's turned out to be rather a large one.

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