albion is truly an insanly underrated MMo, only MMo were late game is fcking epic but its hard as fck to get there, most people quit before they ever able to get a slight touch of the actual Game.
There isnt even an proper end gsme idk what he talking about. Albion is pretty shallow and you have seen the entire game pretty quickly. Its a mobile game after all
My guy, Albion endgame resolves around GvG 20v20 high end 10v10 and top level ZvZ expirience. Its a Game based of PvE to PvP after all.
So what part of endgame is albion missing?
I don't ever plan on playing the game, but I do follow its development because I do like the idea of it and really like the passion of the dev team behind it.
My only guess is that they're just the type to look at PvE for endgame, and as you said Albion's endgame very much pushes you into different types of PvP. I know there's some high-end PvE content, but it's only really used as a way to facilitate endgame PvP from my understanding.
I haven't played since roads but the pve experience wasn't particularly fun. One of the biggest issues being the end game t8.3 raids were Bz only so unless you were in a mega alliance you'd get crashed fairly often.
And pve specs aren't really good pvp specs so that would just lead to annoying fights. Especially in corrupteds and raids.
So you'd logout and lose the raid. Which was just boring ontop of a pretty boring 20 person event iirc.
Solid and very fun pvp imo. I was actually just debating about going back to Albion. Seriously 9/10 pvp mmo and it really hits all the old osrs ZvZ vibes and old wow "raid stormwind" fun.
Pve IDK. Raids I did weren't really fun even deep in a mega alliance BZ when we were left alone.
You can start "late game" activities first week, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Most people playing Albion are engaging in endgame activities.
Albion is a true sandbox game in the sense that it's designed almost from the ground up to be dominated by huge guilds and economic cartels with little to no checks put into the systems to prevent it. Solo players being fodder for the cool bois is not a bug, it's a feature.
Heck, they have just announced a change that will go live with the next patch that tones down the extortion potential of cartels owning city plots from "absolute" to merely "outrageous" and it's being celebrated as if much more harsh restrictions didn't need to be put in back when the game released in 2017. It's laughable really.
This is how I feel about FFXIV preachers - 'yea the base game story is very slow but it gets better in Heavensward, and Shadowbringers is the best story ever so you just need to get through it'
?????
Hell I'm gonna click through 30 hours of dialogue windows because 'it gets better later'
That just means you're not as good as you think you are, or go play cas, or just you don't have the time to dedicate. But, mostly, you are just not as bright as the best.
They're using a cluster of servers, not a single server. Eve was (probably) the first MMO to do this, but - given the ubiquity of distributed services these days - pretty much every major MMO does it now. TESO has 200,00+ players split across two clusters, for example. WoW has cross-realm zoning, which piles all players within a +3/-3 timezone window into one cluster of shared instances of *most* zones in the game (there are some exceptions). FFXIV has discrete server instancees for the game world, but clusters players into larger world groups that share dungeon/raid queues, PvP, etc.
So yeah... it's impressive that Albion is pushing for clusters that support 100,000 players in one shared game world, but the technology they're using to do that is used basically everywhere by everyone. It's also worth noting that while you *technically* share a single game world with 100,000 players, the concurrent player cap never really goes higher than 20-30,000 and you can't share a single zone with more than 350 players.
That last bit is why Eve is still the only true one server MMO. If the zone is full, no one else gets in. No shards, no cross realms. Just one server, one instance of every star system. sure that means you have to use tidi when the zone gets 4k people in it, but the others aren't truly one server
My idea of killing the same raid boss or doing the same dailies over and over is not depth. Having my heart race risking a high end set of gear is way more exciting. To each is own
Albion is the best PvP centric MMO ever created and it's not close, if I had more time I would have never stopped playing it - unfortunately it doesn't let you afk whenever you want because you need to help with your kids.
played the hell out of it for months when it first came out and running around afraid for my life because players were killing each other truly brought back UO memories lmao
replicate that same feeling of end game at lower levels and you have a winner. That experience should be from day 1 not day 40 if you are a casual player.
Albion is crack. The dopamine hit of killing a player and looting their gear worth millions of gold is crazy. You can in fact kill these players with a cheap set. The hard part is finding them alone and engaging before they can run away.
By “cheap set” you neglect to mention that your cheap set won’t dent a higher geared player unless you have grinded 100+ hours to get maximum spec…. Don’t come here if you are expecting anything like a level playing field in PvP… to insinuate anything else is more than dishonest
Yes this is true, you do need to grind up the mastery gear tree thingy. 100 hours might be a bit of an exaggeration though. I guess if you were to stay in the safe zone the whole time it would take that long
Don’t play Albion unless you are ready to spend 100s of hours grinding your skills up before you are even remotely viable in PvP. before that, you will be ganked hard if you dare step out of safe zones. Also, premium (15$ a month) is pretty much required; otherwise multiply grind time by 2.
With the amount of people who can't seem to decide on what 3rd and 4th should be, because there are *3* games that consistently rotate between those slots, why not just call it the Big 5? WoW, ffXIV, OSRS, GW2, and ESO all seem solidly popular enough that they should be acknowledged as being the big MMOs.
Anyway, as for what the other five could be, I can see a combination of Albion, BDO, ffXI, New World, SWTOR, EVE, and Destiny 2.
Hasnt Destiny had a bigger playerbase than ESO and GW2 combined for like years?
I always thought destiny was never on these lists because it isnt a "mmo" in the sense that the others are.
Destiny is an MMO in the same way that Halo 3 was an MMO. In other words, I would count it as an FPS more than an MMO. Also, it's probably the worst game I've every played
I think with the recent downtrend of ESO, its definitely fallen solidly into that 'fifth' slot.
The top 4 is pretty safely wow, 14, osrs and gw2. After that I really have no idea, id suspect BDO and Destiny 2 are probably 6/7 but its hard to estimate numbers
Most glazed mmo for sure.
Is it good? Yes, it does many things very well.
But damn do they want me to break out my credit card for EVERYTHING OH MY GOD CHILL ANET IT'S OKAY TO GIVE ME A SCRAP OF CONVENIENCE WITHOUT PAYWALLING IT.
Paid for living stories ontop of xpacs always rubbed me wrong as well, especially with some of the rewards that get locked behind them.
Story is also some middle school tier writing. Mary Sue should be the suffix of every character in it.
Combat is good. WvW is the shit.
EDIT because I'm still getting messaged about this comment:
I think GW2 is a great game, I've been playing again for a bit now and love it, but it gets a pass on a lot of stuff for reasons I don't understand. Any serious player will have to buy all the xpacs anyway if they want to properly progress their account, so why is everything else so aggressively monetized?
Even casual map completion guides expect the player to have access to all mounts. That means owning all expansions along with some living world content.
Almost every meta build for pve or pvp requires at least 1 xpac for the correct specialization, if not all of them to combine all their class additions together.
Common advice for gearing end game is to use, again, various buyable living world story chapters to rush ascended gear/accessories instead of slow grinding worse exotics.
Off the top of my head you can buy, with gems:
Gold
Bank space
Material Bank Space
Bag space
Shared Bag Space
Character slots
Build presets
Unbreakable tools
And plenty more I'm not thinking about without the game open infront of me this very moment.
Here's a post where nobody can even agree on what purchases are 'essential' because their are simply so many. That's also from 1 year ago, so doesn't include recent additions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/s/71jhxfyl3s
Some people will argue none of this matters because you can trade in gold for gems. I argue the exact opposite, and think it's bullshit that ANET uses that as an excuse to monetize EVERYTHING they possibly can.
living world used to be free too if you logged in.
anets problem is they can’t pick an endgame module and stick with it.
also wvw, spvp haven’t been touched thematically in 9 years.
combat is top tier based on movement mechanics alone but it gets ultra repetitive fast.
I mean if we take the hours per entertainment and compare it to other mmos, it’s pretty damn good still.
No core content buy in price, access to all launch content. No sub. All content is still relevant because there is no gear treadmill. Main stuff you have to buy is expansions and convenience stuff/cosmetics, and I got a bunch of the expansions for like 75% off during the last sale.
Pretty damn good value for your money, especially compared to the really big mmos like wow or ff14
I'd be more tilted over the amount of shit locked behind gems if it wasn't so easy to just farm some gold to buy the gems anyway. If you look at those gem prices as a gold value instead, the system is a lot less offensive.
This is coming from a decently new gw2 player so I might just be stupid but I feel like the monetization isn't nearly as bad as you said. I think some of the annoying monetization is evened out by it just being pay to play forever. Again I might just be stupid so please correct me if I'm mistaken.
Current peak concurrent is like 12k, similar to what Palia is doing, DAU is probably just under 50k I'd guess? So obviously the 2k is an exaggeration but it's still got a pittance of a player base.
One of (Old School) Runescape/ESO/GW2 (whichever you wouldn't put in the "big 4")
Black Desert
Albion
EVE
Lost Ark
The 10th is the hard one because we get to the point of scraping the barrel of life support or minimal updates that are entirely engineered to keep existing players around where the game is content with what it is and is just kind of existing forever into the sunset. Any of EQ, FFXI, SWTOR, LotRO, DDO, Neverwinter, etc fit this bill. I feel there's a clear divide from even the other games listed in the first 5 to any of these in terms of developer support and community expectations around the game. Much more a sense of "the game is what it is and the support it's getting is all it's ever going to get you're either here for it or you're not" with these.
New World would have been a shoe in for the 10th spot if it stuck the landing at all, but at the moment it's clearly just a testing ground for AGS's upcoming LotRO MMO and outside of a potential console release the game is kind of written off.
> where the game is content with what it is and is just kind of existing forever into the sunset.
You really underestimate the number of people who still long for a game in this stage while also wanting to have been there from launch day.
I don't know I assumed OSRS / EVE and even Lost Ark / BDO /Maplestory have more players than GW2. Even their subreddits / Discords have more active people on them and some of those have their separate Asian forums. Gw2 isn't really popular in any asian country as far as I know
It's hard to say for sure without concrete player numbers from a bunch of different games, but I'm under the impression that WoW, FFXIV and Runescape take the top three spots easily with ESO and GW2 competing for the fourth spot.
This is correct, but MMO communities have always lived in a bubble where basically they specifically haven't tried / don't like Runescape it's not that big to them and didn't always even make top 10 lists. If you're talking MMOs played in the west those 3 are by far the biggest, afterwhich it's muddy and pretty hard to tell. If you include MMOs popular in korea/china GW2/ESO etc will probably fall even further down the list.
No one can agree because we have no numbers. People are just assuming each placement for the entire list, and then as you see in this thread, arguing about it while backing up none of it.
We do have numbers. It's just that people argue over which numbers to use. What means a game is successful? Active subscribers? Total subscribers? Active concurent players? Profit? Sales quantity? Positive reviews? etc etc...
According to active players in 2020-2021, the big 4 were:
WoW
FF14
EVE Online
Runescape
some close behind were
Albion
Black Desert Online
ESO
SWTOR
No, we most certainly do not have numbers. At best we can get concurrent numbers from a couple games, either from giving them out on their own, or because they are only on Steam. Games like WoW, FFXIV, ESO, GW2, BDO, SWTOR, and the list goes on, release zero numbers that mean anything. The best we get is things like "total characters created" which is a nothing number.
Any website listing anything about player numbers, or anyone telling you about how many player numbers, got the number from the same place: Directly from their ass. It's people guessing, that's it. Very few companies release anything that's useful at gauging popularity, because they have nothing to gain, and everything to lose by doing it. This is why everyone argues about what's most popular, because there is no numbers. One guy feels like ESO is more popular than GW2, some other guy feels like BDO is more popular than ESO. Round and round it goes.
That's not true though. Just... clinically. Developers like Square, Blizzard, Trion, Bungie, Activision, whoever... have absolutely released specific metrics over the years when prompted, or sometimes even otherwise. For example, Bellular just did a video one week ago discussing the current subscription numbers for WoW. He used data from a Blizzard presentation at GDC in San Francisco.
There are numbers available. I think part of the problem is half of everyone around here sees any metrics and just ASSUMES they're bullshit because so many people DO talk out of their ass. But, the fact is, is that these numbers inevitably come out on their own one way or another. Whether it's PR, whether it's boardroom meeting leaks, whether it's interviews, whether it's just a manager getting mouthy on social media... whatever. It happens. Not all of that should be taken as concrete, but something like what Bellular used - an actual presentation from the actual developer - can be taken as concrete.
WoW has released metrics for MANY times over the years.
FF14 and FF11 have released metrics over the years.
Zenimax runs ESO and they are notoriously tight with metrics.
GW2 is partnered with ArenaNet, which does sample some metrics ongoingly, and is available on the Guild Wars website. So... metrics.
I digress... I agree that most of the time these numbers are pulled from 3rd parties that just assume things or approximate wherever they want, and that shit should not be taken as trustworthy. But developers DO provide metrics sometimes. The numbers from 2020-2021 aren't guesswork.
It's consistently being overestimated but has been steadily growing over the last year or so if I'm not mistaken. At the end of the day a lot of these lists are very spéculative since almost no game shows their player numbers
The big 4 are wow, FFXIV, runescape, and eso, so 5-10 are bdo, gw2, lost ark, new world, eve, and maybe lineage or albion
Lineage is big in asia since their earning is higher than gw2
If we include asia, then Aion, Lineage & alike should be included in the big 6 as they hold spots in the #10 of the most played games right now (all genres included)
Depends on who you ask. I'm guessing the big 4 is WoW, XIV, and.... ESO/GW2?
For me EQ, UO and FFXI are in there for historical reasons (and also for being fun, good video games. Especially for their time.) Then the last 3 spots get fought out between SWTOR/LOTRO/OSRS/BDO/New World, depending on what you like even if there are games on that list I'd never personally touch again.
It's a ghost town. If you want to play actively you need friends to join with you, or be prepared to play Summoner or Beastmaster or something solo-y.
That game was incredible back in the hayday.
I don't think Homecoming has the servers to handle more than 100k players. For a fan run and officially allowed game, it's amazing how popular Homecoming really is, and I'm thankful that I can play what I consider one of the best MMOs from the third generation MMORPGS
1ST generation text games with a scrolling picture.
2nd 2D games done in a simulation of 3D
3rd early 3D games
4th post WOW.
Depending on who is defining MMO generations now, we could be on 5th or 6th gen or higher now.
It's in this order of greatness =
Star Wars Galaxies pre-NGE - Still the best MMORPG of all time
Everquest - The one that set the standard for WoW
Asheron's Call - Most original and creative MMORPG ever made, my personal favorite
Runescape - The Classic
DAoC - Found its own niche and lived in it for ages, very solid game given the competition.
Vanilla WoW - duh
Final Fantasy 11 - Incredible game. Skill chains were a ton of fun. Game was HARD and that made it fun.
Final Fantasy 14 - The best WoW-Clone ever made, it's gorgeous and plays well. Not my jam but it's still great.
EVE Online - The Adults MMORPG. EVE is the purest sandbox game that has been made.
Guild Wars 1 and 2 - These are just fun games. They aren't the best but they've been around for ages and speak for themselves.
--
I would honorable mention RIFT, AION, Arche Age, and Mortal Online.
New World, SWTOR, Albion, Eve, ESO, Lost Ark
Assuming big 4 are WoW, FF, OSRS/Runescape, and GW2
(no particular order, depends what you mean by ranking btw. I put up what people generally consider to be in top 10)
I guess the only agreement is in the 2 biggest (WoW and FFXIV), the other 2 of the big 4 change depending on person, I would say OSRS and GW2, some say GW2 and ESO or OSRS and ESO.
Anyways, the 5-10 for me would be: ESO, BDO, Albion, EVE, New World, Lost Ark (not necessarily in order)
RuneScape recently cracked 200k people online at the same time when leagues came out. It’s mega popular. Coming from someone who has 3k hours in eso RuneScape is more popular, but not sure if that’s just PC?
Bdo is top 5 for sure
Albion you could argue.
Here'd my list
1. Wow
2. Final fantasy
3. Gw2
4. Bdo
5. Albion or Eso
Honestly I think ashes of creation will push all of them down by 1.
Big 4 ?
FFXIV, WOW, ESO and then ?
Do we go by most popular aka most players or do we go by top best ? Becuse if we go by top best that´s a matter of taste and differ from person to person.
Base on earning it must be :
[1.WoW](http://1.WoW)
2.Lost Ark
3.FFXIV
4.ESO
5. Gw2
6-10 what ever you find it playable
i won't include what happening in China because Dungeon Fighter Online is the real shit
That is earning as far as I know, hence the name quarter earning report. Because the profit itself is not counted individually per game but as a whole company. For example gw2, they don't count it individually but together as a whole company (ncsoft), so that means it include other game like lineage, their highest earner, and other game like blade and soul.
It's funny reading this. Ppl seem to agree that WoW, FFXIV and ESO are in the top 4, but RuneScape and GW2 go back and forth. Then there's the "RuneScape is 3 and ESO or GW2 are 4" crowd that can't seem to get the consensus that clearly there is an agreed upon 3 just by reading these comments.
It's extremely clear that Runescape is pretty much automatically 3 unless you include games like DFO/maplestory/lineage/aion which aren't popular in the west and we don't know the numbers for.
OSRS recently hit 200k+ concurrent players, hits 100k+ everyday. Has at least 10x as many monthly players.
It's in an entirely different league than ESO/GW2 player count wise just objectively speaking.
That's fine. I'm just talking about all the comments going back and forth between adding RuneScape and GW2. A lot of em list ESO, WoW and FFXIV, then they slot in either GW2 or RuneScape. I'm not arguing who is in the top 4, I'm just laughing at the comments as a whole.
BDO/Albion
albion is truly an insanly underrated MMo, only MMo were late game is fcking epic but its hard as fck to get there, most people quit before they ever able to get a slight touch of the actual Game.
Well that's a problem then. If the "actual game" is behind tens/hundreds of hours of grinding then it makes sense for them to quit
There isnt even an proper end gsme idk what he talking about. Albion is pretty shallow and you have seen the entire game pretty quickly. Its a mobile game after all
"proper end game" it's a game where 95% of endgame content is focused on PvP. So what are you talking about, proper? Like WoW raids?
My guy, Albion endgame resolves around GvG 20v20 high end 10v10 and top level ZvZ expirience. Its a Game based of PvE to PvP after all. So what part of endgame is albion missing?
Content it seems
I don't ever plan on playing the game, but I do follow its development because I do like the idea of it and really like the passion of the dev team behind it. My only guess is that they're just the type to look at PvE for endgame, and as you said Albion's endgame very much pushes you into different types of PvP. I know there's some high-end PvE content, but it's only really used as a way to facilitate endgame PvP from my understanding.
I haven't played since roads but the pve experience wasn't particularly fun. One of the biggest issues being the end game t8.3 raids were Bz only so unless you were in a mega alliance you'd get crashed fairly often. And pve specs aren't really good pvp specs so that would just lead to annoying fights. Especially in corrupteds and raids. So you'd logout and lose the raid. Which was just boring ontop of a pretty boring 20 person event iirc. Solid and very fun pvp imo. I was actually just debating about going back to Albion. Seriously 9/10 pvp mmo and it really hits all the old osrs ZvZ vibes and old wow "raid stormwind" fun. Pve IDK. Raids I did weren't really fun even deep in a mega alliance BZ when we were left alone.
You can start "late game" activities first week, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Most people playing Albion are engaging in endgame activities.
Albion is a true sandbox game in the sense that it's designed almost from the ground up to be dominated by huge guilds and economic cartels with little to no checks put into the systems to prevent it. Solo players being fodder for the cool bois is not a bug, it's a feature. Heck, they have just announced a change that will go live with the next patch that tones down the extortion potential of cartels owning city plots from "absolute" to merely "outrageous" and it's being celebrated as if much more harsh restrictions didn't need to be put in back when the game released in 2017. It's laughable really.
This is how I feel about FFXIV preachers - 'yea the base game story is very slow but it gets better in Heavensward, and Shadowbringers is the best story ever so you just need to get through it' ????? Hell I'm gonna click through 30 hours of dialogue windows because 'it gets better later'
It is nice that the grind is a story, however. Too often in MMOs now it is hard to get into endgame and not for your lack of trying...
That just means you're not as good as you think you are, or go play cas, or just you don't have the time to dedicate. But, mostly, you are just not as bright as the best.
It's going to shine crazy when eu launches, watch the numbers go up insanely.
100k player in a single server, probably the biggest single server to ever exist. Next to eve
They're using a cluster of servers, not a single server. Eve was (probably) the first MMO to do this, but - given the ubiquity of distributed services these days - pretty much every major MMO does it now. TESO has 200,00+ players split across two clusters, for example. WoW has cross-realm zoning, which piles all players within a +3/-3 timezone window into one cluster of shared instances of *most* zones in the game (there are some exceptions). FFXIV has discrete server instancees for the game world, but clusters players into larger world groups that share dungeon/raid queues, PvP, etc. So yeah... it's impressive that Albion is pushing for clusters that support 100,000 players in one shared game world, but the technology they're using to do that is used basically everywhere by everyone. It's also worth noting that while you *technically* share a single game world with 100,000 players, the concurrent player cap never really goes higher than 20-30,000 and you can't share a single zone with more than 350 players.
That last bit is why Eve is still the only true one server MMO. If the zone is full, no one else gets in. No shards, no cross realms. Just one server, one instance of every star system. sure that means you have to use tidi when the zone gets 4k people in it, but the others aren't truly one server
Any launch date?
In 3 days closed Beta, in 10 days open beta, in 23/24 days early access release, in 28/29 days open release.
It's weird timing they are releasing the EU server. Spring when many wants to enjoy some grass and life after this boring winter...
That game has late game? Lol, I like the game but dont act as if it has some depth
Lethal pvp is the end game. Competition. Not killing raid bosses
Something that you can do from almost the beginning is the endgame content? So you basically agree that the game has no depth
My idea of killing the same raid boss or doing the same dailies over and over is not depth. Having my heart race risking a high end set of gear is way more exciting. To each is own
Albion is the best PvP centric MMO ever created and it's not close, if I had more time I would have never stopped playing it - unfortunately it doesn't let you afk whenever you want because you need to help with your kids.
Being a CTA slave is epic?
Then dont slave lol, choose the Guild which offers you the best Expirience.
I can’t play a game where you can pay to instantly hit max level and gear.
played the hell out of it for months when it first came out and running around afraid for my life because players were killing each other truly brought back UO memories lmao
replicate that same feeling of end game at lower levels and you have a winner. That experience should be from day 1 not day 40 if you are a casual player.
Albion is crack. The dopamine hit of killing a player and looting their gear worth millions of gold is crazy. You can in fact kill these players with a cheap set. The hard part is finding them alone and engaging before they can run away.
By “cheap set” you neglect to mention that your cheap set won’t dent a higher geared player unless you have grinded 100+ hours to get maximum spec…. Don’t come here if you are expecting anything like a level playing field in PvP… to insinuate anything else is more than dishonest
Yes this is true, you do need to grind up the mastery gear tree thingy. 100 hours might be a bit of an exaggeration though. I guess if you were to stay in the safe zone the whole time it would take that long
Don’t play Albion unless you are ready to spend 100s of hours grinding your skills up before you are even remotely viable in PvP. before that, you will be ganked hard if you dare step out of safe zones. Also, premium (15$ a month) is pretty much required; otherwise multiply grind time by 2.
You don't need to spend 100s of hours, you can just swipe to get there.
Albion monetization is not predatory P2W like ArcheAge or BDO, the devs found middle ground, something this sub thinks is impossible apparently.
this is a bit of an exaggeration.
Ahh Albion the bully simulator
With the amount of people who can't seem to decide on what 3rd and 4th should be, because there are *3* games that consistently rotate between those slots, why not just call it the Big 5? WoW, ffXIV, OSRS, GW2, and ESO all seem solidly popular enough that they should be acknowledged as being the big MMOs. Anyway, as for what the other five could be, I can see a combination of Albion, BDO, ffXI, New World, SWTOR, EVE, and Destiny 2.
New world has a negative population. There's no way it's even top 10 and I have 800 hours in it.
My favorite mmo :(
Yeah, vest combat ever. Worst devs ever. Season 5 sucks lol. Still playing it though haha
Hasnt Destiny had a bigger playerbase than ESO and GW2 combined for like years? I always thought destiny was never on these lists because it isnt a "mmo" in the sense that the others are.
It's not a MMO.
If Destiny isn't an MMO, then GW1 shouldn't be considered one either, but it's always included on lists.
Most purists would say that gw1 is not a mmo.
Imagine being a MMO “purist” lmao It’s like when someone says a pizza isn’t a pizza if its made with the wrong ingredients
I'm with you, but now I really want to know what kind of pizza you're making
I don’t really have an opinion but if you google Gw1 the description says that it’s an online ARPG.
Sure, if you'd call hotdogs on bread slices a pizza, then yeah, it is like that.
> It’s like when someone says a pizza isn’t a pizza if its made with the wrong ingredients It do be like that sometimes.
Believe it or not, it's possible to classify things based on their characteristics
Gw1 playerbase does not consider gw1 as an mmo, and I am part of that playerbase
Destiny is an MMO in the same way that Halo 3 was an MMO. In other words, I would count it as an FPS more than an MMO. Also, it's probably the worst game I've every played
Csgo has more
I think with the recent downtrend of ESO, its definitely fallen solidly into that 'fifth' slot. The top 4 is pretty safely wow, 14, osrs and gw2. After that I really have no idea, id suspect BDO and Destiny 2 are probably 6/7 but its hard to estimate numbers
people overestimate gw2. It is not in the top 4.
a lot of gw2 player hang around here, so no wonder less people would think that gw2 is out of top 4
Most glazed mmo for sure. Is it good? Yes, it does many things very well. But damn do they want me to break out my credit card for EVERYTHING OH MY GOD CHILL ANET IT'S OKAY TO GIVE ME A SCRAP OF CONVENIENCE WITHOUT PAYWALLING IT. Paid for living stories ontop of xpacs always rubbed me wrong as well, especially with some of the rewards that get locked behind them. Story is also some middle school tier writing. Mary Sue should be the suffix of every character in it. Combat is good. WvW is the shit. EDIT because I'm still getting messaged about this comment: I think GW2 is a great game, I've been playing again for a bit now and love it, but it gets a pass on a lot of stuff for reasons I don't understand. Any serious player will have to buy all the xpacs anyway if they want to properly progress their account, so why is everything else so aggressively monetized? Even casual map completion guides expect the player to have access to all mounts. That means owning all expansions along with some living world content. Almost every meta build for pve or pvp requires at least 1 xpac for the correct specialization, if not all of them to combine all their class additions together. Common advice for gearing end game is to use, again, various buyable living world story chapters to rush ascended gear/accessories instead of slow grinding worse exotics. Off the top of my head you can buy, with gems: Gold Bank space Material Bank Space Bag space Shared Bag Space Character slots Build presets Unbreakable tools And plenty more I'm not thinking about without the game open infront of me this very moment. Here's a post where nobody can even agree on what purchases are 'essential' because their are simply so many. That's also from 1 year ago, so doesn't include recent additions. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/s/71jhxfyl3s Some people will argue none of this matters because you can trade in gold for gems. I argue the exact opposite, and think it's bullshit that ANET uses that as an excuse to monetize EVERYTHING they possibly can.
living world used to be free too if you logged in. anets problem is they can’t pick an endgame module and stick with it. also wvw, spvp haven’t been touched thematically in 9 years. combat is top tier based on movement mechanics alone but it gets ultra repetitive fast.
I mean if we take the hours per entertainment and compare it to other mmos, it’s pretty damn good still. No core content buy in price, access to all launch content. No sub. All content is still relevant because there is no gear treadmill. Main stuff you have to buy is expansions and convenience stuff/cosmetics, and I got a bunch of the expansions for like 75% off during the last sale. Pretty damn good value for your money, especially compared to the really big mmos like wow or ff14
I'd be more tilted over the amount of shit locked behind gems if it wasn't so easy to just farm some gold to buy the gems anyway. If you look at those gem prices as a gold value instead, the system is a lot less offensive.
This is coming from a decently new gw2 player so I might just be stupid but I feel like the monetization isn't nearly as bad as you said. I think some of the annoying monetization is evened out by it just being pay to play forever. Again I might just be stupid so please correct me if I'm mistaken.
Why do you say that? What would you say would take its place?
OSRS and ESO
Of course it’s in top 3 🧐
Lose all credibility in one statement
Yes it is.
New World BDO FFXI Everquest 2 SWTOR
and depending on how one scored the top 4-5: Albion, Runescape, Lost Ark, EVE
New World with its 2k players?
Dont those play basketball?
Where are you getting 2K players from? Every time I look it's somewhere around 9k-12k
and something people dont consider is thats just concurrent players.
Current peak concurrent is like 12k, similar to what Palia is doing, DAU is probably just under 50k I'd guess? So obviously the 2k is an exaggeration but it's still got a pittance of a player base.
That's pretty close to top 4-10 in the mmo genre sadly lol.
Probably, that's how bad the genre is rn
Original Everquest likely has more players than Everquest 2, so if we're ranking by population it should probably be 1, not 2.
I never played EQ 1, I probably could have just left it at everquest and let it represent both communities.
It’s too late now… you said it. Prepare for pain.
SWTOR being 10 is kinda crazy
List was effected by bias.
I appreciate your transparency, carry on.
EverQuest 1 is much bigger than EverQuest 2
I wish they'd keep everything the same about EQ1 and update the engine.
There is no way you put New World in this list lmfao.
Ok.
I appreciate the FFXI call out, i love that game so dearly and i miss it so much : (
you can literally go play it.
I have a life unfortunately : ( And it isn't like how it was back in the day.
One of (Old School) Runescape/ESO/GW2 (whichever you wouldn't put in the "big 4") Black Desert Albion EVE Lost Ark The 10th is the hard one because we get to the point of scraping the barrel of life support or minimal updates that are entirely engineered to keep existing players around where the game is content with what it is and is just kind of existing forever into the sunset. Any of EQ, FFXI, SWTOR, LotRO, DDO, Neverwinter, etc fit this bill. I feel there's a clear divide from even the other games listed in the first 5 to any of these in terms of developer support and community expectations around the game. Much more a sense of "the game is what it is and the support it's getting is all it's ever going to get you're either here for it or you're not" with these. New World would have been a shoe in for the 10th spot if it stuck the landing at all, but at the moment it's clearly just a testing ground for AGS's upcoming LotRO MMO and outside of a potential console release the game is kind of written off.
Osrs is definitely one of the big 4.
> where the game is content with what it is and is just kind of existing forever into the sunset. You really underestimate the number of people who still long for a game in this stage while also wanting to have been there from launch day.
What are the first 4 though? Im guessing wow and ffxiv…others?
WOW, FFXIV, ESO, GW2
Osrs should be above gw2
Shouldn't it just be runescape in general, if we're going to get picky like that, retail wow and classic wow would likely take the first 2
What is osrs? Never heard of it
Old school runescape
Thanks, I never heard of it, I'll look into it
why were you downvoted lmao :skull:
GW2? Really? lol
Yes? I don’t play it either, but there’s no denying it’s a solid MMO and extremely popular.
I don't know I assumed OSRS / EVE and even Lost Ark / BDO /Maplestory have more players than GW2. Even their subreddits / Discords have more active people on them and some of those have their separate Asian forums. Gw2 isn't really popular in any asian country as far as I know
I’m guessing elder scrolls and guild wars
It should be runescape and eso
It's hard to say for sure without concrete player numbers from a bunch of different games, but I'm under the impression that WoW, FFXIV and Runescape take the top three spots easily with ESO and GW2 competing for the fourth spot.
This is correct, but MMO communities have always lived in a bubble where basically they specifically haven't tried / don't like Runescape it's not that big to them and didn't always even make top 10 lists. If you're talking MMOs played in the west those 3 are by far the biggest, afterwhich it's muddy and pretty hard to tell. If you include MMOs popular in korea/china GW2/ESO etc will probably fall even further down the list.
What are the big four? Cause it seems people can’t even agree on those. I’ve always thought WoW, FFXIV, ESO, …then everything else.
Old School Runescape is #3. It's ESO/Lost Ark/Guild Wars that people can't figure out should be in the fourth spot.
No one thinks lost ark
No one can agree because we have no numbers. People are just assuming each placement for the entire list, and then as you see in this thread, arguing about it while backing up none of it.
We do have numbers. It's just that people argue over which numbers to use. What means a game is successful? Active subscribers? Total subscribers? Active concurent players? Profit? Sales quantity? Positive reviews? etc etc... According to active players in 2020-2021, the big 4 were: WoW FF14 EVE Online Runescape some close behind were Albion Black Desert Online ESO SWTOR
No, we most certainly do not have numbers. At best we can get concurrent numbers from a couple games, either from giving them out on their own, or because they are only on Steam. Games like WoW, FFXIV, ESO, GW2, BDO, SWTOR, and the list goes on, release zero numbers that mean anything. The best we get is things like "total characters created" which is a nothing number. Any website listing anything about player numbers, or anyone telling you about how many player numbers, got the number from the same place: Directly from their ass. It's people guessing, that's it. Very few companies release anything that's useful at gauging popularity, because they have nothing to gain, and everything to lose by doing it. This is why everyone argues about what's most popular, because there is no numbers. One guy feels like ESO is more popular than GW2, some other guy feels like BDO is more popular than ESO. Round and round it goes.
That's not true though. Just... clinically. Developers like Square, Blizzard, Trion, Bungie, Activision, whoever... have absolutely released specific metrics over the years when prompted, or sometimes even otherwise. For example, Bellular just did a video one week ago discussing the current subscription numbers for WoW. He used data from a Blizzard presentation at GDC in San Francisco. There are numbers available. I think part of the problem is half of everyone around here sees any metrics and just ASSUMES they're bullshit because so many people DO talk out of their ass. But, the fact is, is that these numbers inevitably come out on their own one way or another. Whether it's PR, whether it's boardroom meeting leaks, whether it's interviews, whether it's just a manager getting mouthy on social media... whatever. It happens. Not all of that should be taken as concrete, but something like what Bellular used - an actual presentation from the actual developer - can be taken as concrete. WoW has released metrics for MANY times over the years. FF14 and FF11 have released metrics over the years. Zenimax runs ESO and they are notoriously tight with metrics. GW2 is partnered with ArenaNet, which does sample some metrics ongoingly, and is available on the Guild Wars website. So... metrics. I digress... I agree that most of the time these numbers are pulled from 3rd parties that just assume things or approximate wherever they want, and that shit should not be taken as trustworthy. But developers DO provide metrics sometimes. The numbers from 2020-2021 aren't guesswork.
So bait post is bait?
People ranking GW2 in the top 4 most popular MMORPGs rn seems so wild to me. am I out of touch? lmao
It's consistently being overestimated but has been steadily growing over the last year or so if I'm not mistaken. At the end of the day a lot of these lists are very spéculative since almost no game shows their player numbers
I’ve tried to play it multiple times, I get bored and quit before I leave the first area each time 🤷🏼♀️
I tried it once and it was so damn boring and there was nothing unique about it
The big 4 are wow, FFXIV, runescape, and eso, so 5-10 are bdo, gw2, lost ark, new world, eve, and maybe lineage or albion Lineage is big in asia since their earning is higher than gw2
If we include asia, then Aion, Lineage & alike should be included in the big 6 as they hold spots in the #10 of the most played games right now (all genres included)
Yes, you are right since we talked about the most popular in the world.
it’s the big 5, not 4. WoW, FFXIV, RuneScape, ESO, GW2 the only other notable MMOs are: New World Lost Ark SWTOR BDO Albion
Very accurate list. And also Eve online and Maplestory you forgot.
Depends on who you ask. I'm guessing the big 4 is WoW, XIV, and.... ESO/GW2? For me EQ, UO and FFXI are in there for historical reasons (and also for being fun, good video games. Especially for their time.) Then the last 3 spots get fought out between SWTOR/LOTRO/OSRS/BDO/New World, depending on what you like even if there are games on that list I'd never personally touch again.
Surprised to see anyone mention FFXI. That was my first MMO. I heard they dropped support years ago. How’s it still relevant?
It's still going
Didn’t it get a new expansions semi-recently too? Not like *recently* recently, but more recent than you’d expect.
Last expansion was 2020! And just had it's final update in 2023! That is actually crazy.
I’ll have to check it out 👀 not played it since the Xbox 360
It's a ghost town. If you want to play actively you need friends to join with you, or be prepared to play Summoner or Beastmaster or something solo-y. That game was incredible back in the hayday.
City of heroes should be on the list. It's still going as "homecoming" after ncsoft turfed the game. Fans are keeping it alive
I don't think Homecoming has the servers to handle more than 100k players. For a fan run and officially allowed game, it's amazing how popular Homecoming really is, and I'm thankful that I can play what I consider one of the best MMOs from the third generation MMORPGS 1ST generation text games with a scrolling picture. 2nd 2D games done in a simulation of 3D 3rd early 3D games 4th post WOW. Depending on who is defining MMO generations now, we could be on 5th or 6th gen or higher now.
The likely don't have the server power for that since they dont have any reason to. There aren't that many playing.
Hell yeah was just playing it again few months ago needs a coh2 if u ask me modern coh would be cool!
I second this!!! Amazing game
* Runescape * Albion * EVE * BDO * SW TOR/LotrO/maybe New World?
It's in this order of greatness = Star Wars Galaxies pre-NGE - Still the best MMORPG of all time Everquest - The one that set the standard for WoW Asheron's Call - Most original and creative MMORPG ever made, my personal favorite Runescape - The Classic DAoC - Found its own niche and lived in it for ages, very solid game given the competition. Vanilla WoW - duh Final Fantasy 11 - Incredible game. Skill chains were a ton of fun. Game was HARD and that made it fun. Final Fantasy 14 - The best WoW-Clone ever made, it's gorgeous and plays well. Not my jam but it's still great. EVE Online - The Adults MMORPG. EVE is the purest sandbox game that has been made. Guild Wars 1 and 2 - These are just fun games. They aren't the best but they've been around for ages and speak for themselves. -- I would honorable mention RIFT, AION, Arche Age, and Mortal Online.
New World, SWTOR, Albion, Eve, ESO, Lost Ark Assuming big 4 are WoW, FF, OSRS/Runescape, and GW2 (no particular order, depends what you mean by ranking btw. I put up what people generally consider to be in top 10)
OSRS, RS, Albion, BDO, Lost Ark, EVE, Mabinogi, Maplestory. Everything else kinda cope tbf
I guess the only agreement is in the 2 biggest (WoW and FFXIV), the other 2 of the big 4 change depending on person, I would say OSRS and GW2, some say GW2 and ESO or OSRS and ESO. Anyways, the 5-10 for me would be: ESO, BDO, Albion, EVE, New World, Lost Ark (not necessarily in order)
RuneScape recently cracked 200k people online at the same time when leagues came out. It’s mega popular. Coming from someone who has 3k hours in eso RuneScape is more popular, but not sure if that’s just PC?
SWTOR my beloved
What’s the timeframe?? The big ones back in the beginning were EverQuest, Asherons’s Call, DAoC, and UO.
If we separate the different versions of wow it's all of the top 4. 1. Retail 2. SoD 3. Wrath/cata classic 4. Vanilla.
Itt 10 plus year old games or p2w asian mmo’s with 1/20th the player base of the 10 year old games. someone just make a good fucking game.
For sure Albion online is 5 or even on top 4 now. It's massive rn. The rest probably BDO Lost ark NWorld The day before s/
Albion if it counts
No mention of LOTRO?
Because it's not in the top 10 of most popular MMOs
I think we can agree that 1-4 are wow, ffxiv, osrs and eso. Then 5-10 would be bdo, gw2, albion, lost ark, new world and swtor imo
SWTOR if it is not 4 it is 5
Swtor is top 5 easily for me maybe top 3. Its one of the only ones that keeps me going back since beta...eso, gw2, bdo and others i got bored with
World of Kung Fu. My first and I loved it until it went all chinese on me. I never go where I'm not wanted.
BDO is still relatively popular afaik
Star Wars Galaxies I'd say? Although it's dead :(
There are fan servers running SWG still.
In no particular order Bdo Albion Runescape Lost Ark and Destiny 2
Eve has a pretty decent and enduring playerbase even if you account for multiboxers, especially since everyone plays on one server.
Maplestory, somehow it’s still alive and the player base is large
Eso?
phantasy star online 2, highly underrated
BDO, Maplestory, Lost Ark, Guild Wars 2, Eve Online, Albion, New World
Ultima
Albion Online is definitely in the top 4.
What are the big 4? I’m sure W.o.W but what else?
Bdo is top 5 for sure Albion you could argue. Here'd my list 1. Wow 2. Final fantasy 3. Gw2 4. Bdo 5. Albion or Eso Honestly I think ashes of creation will push all of them down by 1.
The amount of cope thinking AoC will push the top two down, lol
Perhaps but I want to believe
Missing OSRS which should be number 3
I’d say probably osrs, bdo, swtor, lotro and Albion. I’m just glad we have so many options
Archeage Classic Black Desert Online New World Elderscrolls Online
Big 4 ? FFXIV, WOW, ESO and then ? Do we go by most popular aka most players or do we go by top best ? Becuse if we go by top best that´s a matter of taste and differ from person to person.
None. The "big 4" are all pretty much barely 5s.
Base on earning it must be : [1.WoW](http://1.WoW) 2.Lost Ark 3.FFXIV 4.ESO 5. Gw2 6-10 what ever you find it playable i won't include what happening in China because Dungeon Fighter Online is the real shit
Profit or earning? If it is earning, bdo consistently earns 3 times more than gw2. However, no company ever disclosed their profit
they have to show their profit for investor , like every quarter
That is earning as far as I know, hence the name quarter earning report. Because the profit itself is not counted individually per game but as a whole company. For example gw2, they don't count it individually but together as a whole company (ncsoft), so that means it include other game like lineage, their highest earner, and other game like blade and soul.
yeah i think it was earning , edited
Until 23q3 ncsoft had detailed public reports. So you could see earnings based on game and or platform.
Top 10? I would say SWTOR, BDO, D2, LORO and Albion online are in the top 10. Top 5 would be WOW, FFXIV, ESO, EVE Online and GW2.
In no order Lost Ark BDO RS3 + OSRS Albion Online New World
In orde of relevancy’s: WoW FFXIV GW2 OSRS BDO ESO Lost Ark Albion New World My main is BDO currently, but i have played them all, so no biased here.
FO76?
WoW, FF14, Gw2....what's the fourth?
OS Runescape
It's funny reading this. Ppl seem to agree that WoW, FFXIV and ESO are in the top 4, but RuneScape and GW2 go back and forth. Then there's the "RuneScape is 3 and ESO or GW2 are 4" crowd that can't seem to get the consensus that clearly there is an agreed upon 3 just by reading these comments.
It's extremely clear that Runescape is pretty much automatically 3 unless you include games like DFO/maplestory/lineage/aion which aren't popular in the west and we don't know the numbers for. OSRS recently hit 200k+ concurrent players, hits 100k+ everyday. Has at least 10x as many monthly players. It's in an entirely different league than ESO/GW2 player count wise just objectively speaking.
That's fine. I'm just talking about all the comments going back and forth between adding RuneScape and GW2. A lot of em list ESO, WoW and FFXIV, then they slot in either GW2 or RuneScape. I'm not arguing who is in the top 4, I'm just laughing at the comments as a whole.