Welcome to the Online Gaming Zeitgeist
You know, I’ve started this website some two years ago as I do with most of my websites and general time-wasting projects: as an experiment, with no clear goal in mind, just to learn something (regular expressions under PHP, on this case) and do something fun in the process (look at how the online game presence of certain games progressed).
Over the years, despite some bumps in the road, it has grown to be something fairly nice (content-wise), so a page overhaul was long overdue. Also, on the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing some intense interest on the website from different parts of the game industry and game community, and there are some points that can bring some interesting discussion (I’ve been limited to email exchange between some people), so I had this idea in mind that a blog was the best way to keep things rolling. I won’t post much, mind you, but once in a while I (as well as readers) might have a bit to talk about.
So here it is: a minimal face lift, and more importantly, allowing posts and comments. It’s still using a built-in WordPress template that I have to fix here and there, but I guess it works for now.
And remember: I’m not here to provide answers. I’m here to provide questions.
April 29th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Hi. I was checking through my old bookmarks to clear out the unused ones and saw that you’ve changed the site and added a blog. I suppose this post, though quite old, is the best place for me to make my comment.
Why was your link in the dustbin? Well, the only game I was interested in following was Neverwinter Nights. I was also very much anticipating seeing what happened with NWN 1 as NWN 2 was released. Unfortunately, your decision to eliminate the listing of non-FPS games also eliminated my reasons for visiting.
I’m not complaining. Your site, your choices. Fair enough. But I figured you might want to know why one person (me) stopped visiting.
At least I got to see, briefly, a year’s worth of NWN trend when I discovered your site about a year ago. I thank you for that. Best wishes for your future endeavors.
April 29th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Dellaster: sure, I understand. Thanks for letting me know.
The reason I’ve decided to focus this on FPSs is because the list was getting too cluttered already and adding all non-FPS games (which are a tiny bit on GameSpy’s stats page) wasn’t helping; they were just making noise. With the recent addition of a few DS games and racing games, I’d need to make something and decided to removed all non-FPS games; this includes RPGs. Many of the games listed on GameSpy’s pages are simply games where GameSpy industries had some work (ie, developing the master server list), so they’re only listed due to corporate interest, not because it’s fair to compare them to other FPS’s.
Again, I understand your point, but this still is the way the page was designed. I mean, even if they featured WoW numbers there, I’d still remove it from the list.
The positive point is that, because both NWN and NWN2 are still popular (that is, they appear on the top 40 list on gamespy stats’ home), they’re still added to the database on every update; they’re just not drawn on the graphics. I have the stats on its original, raw form, so if you want them to make something out of them, please let me know.
And as a little good-bye gift, here’s something I’ve generated, a small token of statistics love:
http://www.onlinegamingzeitgeist.com/graphs/games(328,1391)_5_players.png
The link is broken because I used parenthesis, but well, a copy&paste should work.
The names are not appearing for some odd reason (probably due to the fact that I had to force drawing the lines), but the lines belong, respectively, to NWN and NWN2.
April 29th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Hey, thank you very much for that custom graph, Zeh! That’s exactly what I wanted to see. 🙂
As I suspected, NWN 2 didn’t expand the online player base at all, it just borrowed a portion of the NWN 1 players. And it looks like the overall NWN 1&2 online player base continues to decline. That’s disappointing, but it’s best to understand and face the facts, I think.
I do understand why you’d want to focus on the games you’re interested in and thereby make the graphs more readable. I would do the same thing in your position.
Again, thank you for the NWN 1&2 graph. If you have no objections I’ll be linking to it in a future blog post. Or I can host it myself, leaving the credit information intact.
Best wishes,
— Dellaster
April 29th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Dellaster: don’t worry, you can use it as you wish.
Regarding NWN2, I’m a bit surprised by the numbers, even if I’ve only played NWN1… anyhow, take their position on the graph a grain of salt; GameSpy is nice most of the times, but they’re not 100% reliable, so if possible, try getting a few numbers from some other places for a better picture.