Date Posted: 10/18 8:21pm Subject: RE: 6PM EST - Saturday - No High-High Servers. - Date Edited: 10/18 8:22pm (1 edits total) Edited By: MarkJacobsEA
Folks,

As everyone knows today was the end of the 30 days trial period for WAR. No MMORPG, not even WoW, has had 100% of the people who buy the box then sign up to play the game. For a good reference check, when DAoC first launched it had one of the highest conversion rates (those who buy the box and then become paying customers) at the time when in it's first month it had 72%. Of course, most industry people (including myself) think WoW's conversion rate was much higher than that. Thus, it is expected that you will lose some people when you first switch to billing (unless you don't sell well the first few weeks). In our case, we sold exceptionally well and so we expected our peak numbers to go down a little bit. While I can't disclose the exact numbers (and neither does WoW, EQ, etc.) for reasons I've talked about before (public company, financial disclosure), I can say that as of five minutes ago our peak server population was only about 3% lower than yesterday's peak numbers. Considering that this was our first billing day (well second actually but the first was very small) and that our competitor is certainly trying to attract people back this weekend, I'm extremely happy with that number. Also, it is pretty standard for all MMOs that the number of people who miss their billing day, start to trickle back within the next few days to enter their CC information and resub. In the case of DAoC, we gained about 5% from each billing day as customers reactivated their accounts.

So, I'm sorry to disappoint some of you but the sky is not falling (again), unless you expected that we'd have a 100% conversion rate in which case, I'd love to sell you some oceanfront property in Arizona. happy

Edit: And yes, we did raise the server caps as well not too long ago.

Mark