Aion seems to be a hit

Its early to say it but Aion seems to be getting praise from gamers. No official review has been set yet by a gaming site, nor will be taken seriously until they get midway. However I’ve been looking at peoples responses for the game and some of them are hailing this a world of warcraft killer.

As from 23rd September 2009

Not that I trust Gamespot but I trust the gamers over their bias paid reviews

198 gamers average score of 8.9

Metacritic is a great honest site that takes the averages from all sites, but their user score is slightly less.

28 gamers average score 8.2

Be wary of early hype

Early adopters are all looking for a replacement to World of Warcraft (as I am too). At first glance be fooled into the games beauty, then to be shot into grinding all through the mid-levels. I’m expecting a dip in these reviews over the next 2 weeks. However I won’t be diving into this game for at least 2 weeks (when the hype is slowly dies down). I remember the pain of starting MMO’s from day one, too many on servers, down times, etc. Check back soon for an update on the reviews.

11.5 million subscribers, my arse

Could World of Warcraft be a victim of white lies? well they keep on bragging about the 11 million subscribers. Surely times 11,000,000 with the monthly subscription + games sold would equal a crazy amount of money monthly. The merge with Activision, if they are making crazy amounts monthly why merge?

Personally I think its figures they are using from free trials to lost subscribers added to the list. I myself have 4 accounts (3 for myself and 1 for my wife). I used to dual box for fun, as I was so bored leveling my 6th character to 70.

Finding the maximum players that can appear on a server, apparently its 20,000 but Blizzard have never released the official numbers. (Source)

Lets do the math

11,500,000 subscribers / 20,000 = 575 servers worldwide

Thats nearly 600 servers having to be completely full to reach 11.5 million subscribers.

The US alone has 200 realms (source) so thats roughly:

• 4,000,000 players in the US alone if each server is 20,000 limit
• 6,000,000 players in the US alone if each server is 30,000 limit

Please take note, this is if all 200 of the US servers are maxed out to the full. If we take a mean result from this, lets say 5,000,000 subscribers on US servers alone. This leaves 6.5 million left worldwide.

Somehow these numbers don’t add up, they are obviously getting mixed up with inactive trial signups & inactive accounts over subscribers. Trouble is we live in a follow the herd society… this leaves new MMO’s out to die as they can only compete with thousands of real subscribers. No one will never know the truth about actual numbers, however I’d love to hear from you if you have any inside info.