Wilhelm over at TAGN has a nice post pointing out some recent stats released by X-fire.

The Top 10 games, based on average hours played daily over the course of the month (without WoW), were:

1. EVE Online
2. Lord of the Rings Online
3. Lineage II
4. Star Wars Galaxies
5. Final Fantasy XI Online
6. EverQuest II
7. City of Heroes
8. Dark Age of Camelot
9. Ultima Online
10. EverQuest

He asks at the end of his post what others think the numbers mean, and halfway during my response I realized I was rambling, so instead of a comment we get this post here.

While I agree with Wilhelm that X-fire is likely used by more hardcore players than casuals, I think the numbers it gets do give us a fairly accurate view of the major MMOs. Many guilds will point players towards X-fire to improve guild communication, be it a hardcore raiding guild or a casual one. It’s also one of those ‘load and forget’ types of programs, that don’t impact your system much and can be left on un-noticed.

On to the list itself, here is what I get from it. EVE players are very dedicated, and can often spend hours upon hours in-game, be it camping a gate or mining. I can see why EVE more than any other game could have a higher ‘hours per week’ total than the other MMOs, due to its play style. In other games, you can set out with a goal to finish a quest, or run an instance, and once complete you log out. In EVE, every activity can be drawn out for hours on end. As I’ve mentioned here in this blog before, PvP also tends to be a virtually limitless supply of content, and as PvP is EVE’s big ‘end game’, this could lead to the hours being run up. I think this is also the reason we see Lineage II as high as it is.

LoTRO’s newness, and overall success, is my reasoning behind it being number two. It’s not heavy on end-game raiding (yet?), and its early to mid game is very casual, so I don’t think the hardcore players playing really runs up its hourly count. Sear volume of players is the likely cause here.

Other than that, I find it interesting that UO is one spot above EQ1, if only because back in the day EQ1 was always dominant over UO in terms of numbers. Being spots 9 and 10 of course this does not say much, but yea… I’m a little surprised DAoC is as low as it is, considering its PvP roots. Not having played it in a long time, perhaps it has not aged well? Or has its user base dropped so low to overwhelm my PvP theory? Another surprise is how low EQ2 shows up. Below FFXI and SWG is certainly surprising, considering the recent release of an expansion pack that had a retail presence.

As always, it would be great to get full numbers on all these games. To have access to subscription numbers and a count of all currently logged in players, like EVE displays. I really think some interesting trends could be tracked, and many design lessons could be learned. Sadly the corporate dollar supersedes the learning potential.