EVE New Citizens Q&A

You're failing to differentiate between the number of active subscriptions and the number of people who are currently logged in.

When it says that TQ has 40K people, that means that 40K people are currently logged in.

There is a pretty big community, but it's also a rather niche game -- you won't find numbers like WoW has.

At the same time, EvE's playerbase tends to be older, on average, than most MMO's players, so you also deal with people who are at work, college, or are spending time with their families. The most active times for these sorts will be in the evenings (their time) and on the weekends.

Possibly, but remember that everyone shares the same game universe in Eve, you could potentially interact with any one of the 36k (at the moment) people online. Most mmo's have a few thousand players per version (server/shard) of the world.

Also for a always on PVP game with items drop on death it has a large subscriber base.

If it helps Eve's subscriber numbers have slowly increased since launch. (usually its the other way around)

Current standards being WoW? You hit the nail on the head with quantity/quality. A lot of people find EVE too difficult to get into, or not their cup of tea because its so player driven and doesn't have "end game" content.

If you wanted to compare in some manner, look how many "typical" MMO servers would be active if you took EVE's playerbase and divided them up among different servers. 8? 10? 12? All those would be fairly decent considering most MMOs end up consolidating after release due to the hype influx and subsequent people leaving.

??? They are still releasing subscriber numbers.

And well, if everyone of the 500k subscribers is playing one hour a day, you should see an average of 20k people online. Which seems to be the case.

Most players aren't hardcore 20+ hours a week players.

Depending on time of day, people simultaneously logged in number usually between 20k and 50k, with an average of around 35k, give or take.
(see: http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility )

My personal average time spent online since I began playing is about 1 hour per day (actually, a bit less than that), with a total of 2,754 logged-in hours and 6,009 log-ins. Then again, I had a much, much higher average in the first couple of years.
The average EVE player actually has a slightly higher average, somewhere in between 1.5 to 2 hours per day (or, to keep it more realistic, translating this to 45-60 hours per month).That average is actually given by a lot more casuals with much less than 1h/day and much fewer hardcore people with 8+ hours per day, but that's a different story.
So, on average, for every person you see online, there's between 12 and 16 subscribers (let's call it 14 for now).
~35k*~14=~490k, which is pretty darn close to the expected 500k subscriber count .



P.S. Of course, if you personally play an average of 8-12 hours a day (full time job or higher level of activity), be it constantly or just now, near the start, the perception is skewed, since the typical player spends nowhere near as much time online (4 to 8 times less, actually)
Also, the people you are most likely to meet and actively engage in talks with are also people spending loads of time online (for reasons that should be pretty obvious), so that's also going to skew perceptions quite a bit.


P.P.S. And I also think they count both Tranquility (the server the vast majority of people from almost anywhere in the world use) and Serenity (a.k.a. "EVE-Online China") in that 500+k subscriber number.
Serenity is a whole different story (a rather long one too). Officially, Serenity is only available to Chinese citizens (we had a couple of outsiders taking a brief stroll around there and sharing stories), and it's a weird sort of franchise-like arrangement due to the odd legislation in China regarding online games availability.
Suffice to say, they have a much smaller userbase (probably much less than 10% of total global users), but with a higher average online time in spite of factors which should limit online time (eh, it's China, that's the way things are over there).
So, on TQ, we have AT LEAST 450k subscribers right now (most likely more, probably around 480k).

Actually it means 40k characters logged in. This would be 40k people if there was only one character per person, which as we all know is far from true.

Number of subscriptions is meaningless. Someone makes an account trying out the game, doesn't like it, he leaves after the free trial - his account is still a "subscription".

As for the actual number of players, no one knows it. Not even CCP can know it, unless they run some really heavy duty heuristic tools that match accounts with IP ranges and log-in timers.

Not even the "currently logged in" is accurate; again, because of the widespread use of alts, you can safely cut that number by at least 1/3 to get the actual number of logged individual people.

Nopes.

Only paid subscriptions are counted.

There has been a drop-off in the number of people logging on recently. This has been attributed to number of reasons including summer holidays and the release of Grand Theft Auto V on consoles. It did seem to line up with the release of GTA V but it may be for other reasons. I don't know to be sure.

At 'peak time' of 6pm GMT the numbers always used to get into the high fiftys daily and maybe a little more at the weekends but not its topping out a little over forty. Other aspects of the in-game economy are worrying but I won't expand any further on the issue. At least one other thread on the issue of falling player numbers has been closed by the ISD for supposed 'trolling'.

Best idea is to wait until Rubicon is launched in November. If numbers don't pick up after then we will be saying 'Houston........we have a problem'.