56.789% of MMO facts are bollocks

All the time I see forum warriors pulling statistics and “facts” out of their arse.

WAR has sold 2 million pre-orders in the Far East!

By my accurate estimate WAR subs are now at 123K

WAR subs are growing 33% every month!!

WAR is in maintenance mode and will be dead within a month!

It’s probably a load of old cock. In reality the facts and statistics, both for and against, are nothing more than rumour and guesswork based upon individual’s perception. Perception that is tainted by their personal experience of WAR, their past MMO preferences and the ranting of people on the forum they have alt-tabbed at work. Unless it has a linked source from EA or Mythic, take any fact or statistic as pure opinion.

People are now giving their “accurate” estimates based on EA’s latest report where apparently the only thing mentioned about WAR was that it was mostly responsible for a 33% increase in their $36million online subscription income. Despite the vagueness, folks are using that percentage to calculate subscription numbers for WAR. Regardless of there being no detail on what was included within in those subs, how the other games subs reduced or increased and so on. By Odin’s beard! People are even using xfire stats as proof… Maybe we have no bloody idea and should accept until EA/Mythic confirm it; we’re just pulling numbers out of our arse to support the argument we want to make.

Both the haters and lovers lash out at each other, forums are trolled to death and finding anything meaningful becomes bloody impossible. Human nature validates our opinions and makes all different ones wrong. We’re right and anyone thinking differently is a noob retard bastard that’s probably 12 years old or a sweaty geek that’s never seen a real woman naked. Let the circle of hate and anger commence! RAAAGHHH! HATE! ANGER! HATE! ANGER! HATE! ANGER!

My perception of WAR is positive. It has problems, it would be naïve to suggest otherwise, but for me it has more good points. It’s still the MMO I see myself playing long term. Based upon my experience of past MMOs I think the idea that the game is going to be turned off is ridiculous. So am I right? Pffft… no idea! What I do know is that my guild is good, very active and committed to WAR, most times that I log in my server has a high/high population and there’s always loads of fighting to be done. However not everyone has those things (and even if they do), their “state of the game” may differ immensely.

I think the latest hype-fest Aion is bloody awful. It runs very well, but it’s too grind based, I loathe the slightly suspect, camp fairy imagery and I believe once it goes live in the west it’s popularity with many western gamers will fizzle out fairly quickly. Archlord, Lineage, RF Online, zzzzzzz, I’ve seen it all before. Now I could go into the many reasons why I feel this about Aion, but I can’t present them as fact; it’s nothing more than my own opinion. Likewise the people I know that liked the Lineage games or Final Fantasy online thingy are pimping Aion like they’ve got Gianna Michaels for a freebie weekend rampage, but that’s just down to their preference and opinion. They predict we will see a new king, a World of Aion if you like, but that's a prediction, not a fact.

It’s very easy for us to make judgements on how the majority view an MMO based on the thoughts of our own gaming communities and the forums and/or blogs we read, but its a monstrously arrogant assumption to believe we represent the majority of MMO gamers, or that it turns us into to some kind of gaming expert with mutant industrial espionage powers.

The reason we’re playing and talking up the MMOs we do is down to our personal perception of that game. I just wish people would be more wary of estimating facts and presenting opinion as anything other than what it is.

One man’s truth is another man’s utter bollocks.

IMHO ;)