How Many Paid Accounts Are There, Really? Housing Let's Us Guess
I've only done this to Erikstaad and Wyndham, but if others want to help we an knock this out.
Housing allows us to estimate how many paid accounts there are.
How?
Each account may have 1 house per account per Ywain per Realm.
This means that all houses, owned by individuals, on Ywain1 Midgard, are uniquely paid accounts. Counting these up gives us a hard lower bound to the total number of accounts paid.
Only doing Erikstaad and Wyndham, I've counted 162 unique paid accounts, split 79 in Erikstaad and 83 in Wyndham. Without any accounting for bias (Erikstaad should have more guild houses than other zones as people seek to hold onto those lots, Wyndham should have slightly less empty lots than average as it's below the mean house number in Mid (guessing this at 2700 roughly, I'll go through and formalize this if people are willing to count houses with me) this leads us to a value of ~40% of Midgard Ywain1 which is 800 unique houses.
Now, the absolute hard cap on the number of unique accounts there can possibly be in this game is set at 9*200*10*3, 9 house zones, 200 houses per zone, 10 servers, 3 realms, which gives us a theoretical hard-cap of 54,000.
A naïve count will then use the 40% estimate and just plug it into 54,000, which gives us a value of 21,600 accounts.
However, people can own 1 house per Ywain per Realm, thus we know with certainty that there are more than 800 accounts and fewer than 54,000. More on that on the 11 o'clock news am I right?
This is where assumptions must be made.
First, how many unique paid accounts own a house on all 3 realms? I'm going to guess this value is 90%. I'm setting it at 90% because I own 4 accounts, but only 3 houses on Mid, 3 on Alb, and 1 on Hib. I'd estimate I'm a more than casual player, but I also know that in the past I generally owned 3 on all the realms. Setting it at 90% I think is highly conservative as I'm saying that, of the 800 unique accounts on Ywain1, only 80 of those people own a house on only Ywain1. I'm willing to guess this value is actually low.
So, we're putting 800 unique houses on Ywain1 for all 3 realms. I'm going to guess the difference in the number of houses, by Realm by Ywain (that is Alb/Mid/Hib Ywain1 differences), is negligible. So, that puts us at 800 unique on mid, 80 unique on Alb, 80 unique on Hib. We're now at 960 unique accounts, again I believe this is an underestimate.
Now we have to blow this up by 10. 9,600 paid accounts. Seems high though, and realistically, people own houses across Ywains. However, I'm willing to guess this value is a lot lower as a % of the population. Yes, I know there will be those of you who own houses on all 10 Ywains, but I'm willing to guess that people own far fewer houses across the Ywain servers. I'm going to put the median player as having 1 Ywain server with a house, and I'm going to put the mean number of Ywains at 2. The difference between the two just is used to establish a range of estimated values and can be made more precise if we have more information.
So, we're saying between 1 and 2 Ywain's per server.
That means our 960 unique accounts get multiplied by 5-10, which puts our total estimated account's at 4,800-9,600.
At $15/month this means the game is pulling down, without taking into account Mith, $72,000-$144,000 a month in revenue. I've no idea what a server costs, how many employees there actually are or what their salaries are. It's also complicated by the reality that BS manages UO as well which generates additional revenue, an estimate of which I have no idea how to calculate given I've never played that game.
How realistic are these estimates of 4,800-9,600? Pretty reasonable I think.
How could it be made better? Well the first is we need a total census of Ywain1 Midgard. A total census of all of housing, broken up by realm and Ywain, would also dramatically improve these estimates as I could back out an estimate on the number of people owning a house on multiple realms and multiple Ywains (especially if given names of those owning said houses as people tend to have similar names through toons).
If you want to improve this estimate, how can you help? If you can go through a housing zone, count up all non-guild owned houses, and let me know by realm/ywain/zone I could get closer to estimating these values.
The biggest uncertainty here is the actual number of houses owned on each unique Ywain1. I pick Ywain1 because it's the most populated and gives us a floor that's closer to the true value. The other primary source of uncertainty is how many people own houses across the three realms. The number of people owning houses on multiple Ywains is less of an issue as I'd be stunned to find out the mean value of Ywain's people own a house on is above 2. I'm willing to guess the true value on that is very close to 1, talking 1.05 or so.
How to tell guild houses from individuals? Any house owned by a name that is shorter than 3 character's, contains multiple capitalized letters, includes a number, or has multiple words, is absolutely a guild name. There are single name guild houses that exist, but in Erikstaad and Wynd I would guess I counted fewer than 5 total guild houses incorrectly. This still gives an error of 10%, but given the primary source of error (multiple houses owned across realms) this is a small error.
tl;dr There are probably 8,000 paid accounts in DAoC. Make of that what you will about the health of the game.
Housing allows us to estimate how many paid accounts there are.
How?
Each account may have 1 house per account per Ywain per Realm.
This means that all houses, owned by individuals, on Ywain1 Midgard, are uniquely paid accounts. Counting these up gives us a hard lower bound to the total number of accounts paid.
Only doing Erikstaad and Wyndham, I've counted 162 unique paid accounts, split 79 in Erikstaad and 83 in Wyndham. Without any accounting for bias (Erikstaad should have more guild houses than other zones as people seek to hold onto those lots, Wyndham should have slightly less empty lots than average as it's below the mean house number in Mid (guessing this at 2700 roughly, I'll go through and formalize this if people are willing to count houses with me) this leads us to a value of ~40% of Midgard Ywain1 which is 800 unique houses.
Now, the absolute hard cap on the number of unique accounts there can possibly be in this game is set at 9*200*10*3, 9 house zones, 200 houses per zone, 10 servers, 3 realms, which gives us a theoretical hard-cap of 54,000.
A naïve count will then use the 40% estimate and just plug it into 54,000, which gives us a value of 21,600 accounts.
However, people can own 1 house per Ywain per Realm, thus we know with certainty that there are more than 800 accounts and fewer than 54,000. More on that on the 11 o'clock news am I right?
This is where assumptions must be made.
First, how many unique paid accounts own a house on all 3 realms? I'm going to guess this value is 90%. I'm setting it at 90% because I own 4 accounts, but only 3 houses on Mid, 3 on Alb, and 1 on Hib. I'd estimate I'm a more than casual player, but I also know that in the past I generally owned 3 on all the realms. Setting it at 90% I think is highly conservative as I'm saying that, of the 800 unique accounts on Ywain1, only 80 of those people own a house on only Ywain1. I'm willing to guess this value is actually low.
So, we're putting 800 unique houses on Ywain1 for all 3 realms. I'm going to guess the difference in the number of houses, by Realm by Ywain (that is Alb/Mid/Hib Ywain1 differences), is negligible. So, that puts us at 800 unique on mid, 80 unique on Alb, 80 unique on Hib. We're now at 960 unique accounts, again I believe this is an underestimate.
Now we have to blow this up by 10. 9,600 paid accounts. Seems high though, and realistically, people own houses across Ywains. However, I'm willing to guess this value is a lot lower as a % of the population. Yes, I know there will be those of you who own houses on all 10 Ywains, but I'm willing to guess that people own far fewer houses across the Ywain servers. I'm going to put the median player as having 1 Ywain server with a house, and I'm going to put the mean number of Ywains at 2. The difference between the two just is used to establish a range of estimated values and can be made more precise if we have more information.
So, we're saying between 1 and 2 Ywain's per server.
That means our 960 unique accounts get multiplied by 5-10, which puts our total estimated account's at 4,800-9,600.
At $15/month this means the game is pulling down, without taking into account Mith, $72,000-$144,000 a month in revenue. I've no idea what a server costs, how many employees there actually are or what their salaries are. It's also complicated by the reality that BS manages UO as well which generates additional revenue, an estimate of which I have no idea how to calculate given I've never played that game.
How realistic are these estimates of 4,800-9,600? Pretty reasonable I think.
How could it be made better? Well the first is we need a total census of Ywain1 Midgard. A total census of all of housing, broken up by realm and Ywain, would also dramatically improve these estimates as I could back out an estimate on the number of people owning a house on multiple realms and multiple Ywains (especially if given names of those owning said houses as people tend to have similar names through toons).
If you want to improve this estimate, how can you help? If you can go through a housing zone, count up all non-guild owned houses, and let me know by realm/ywain/zone I could get closer to estimating these values.
The biggest uncertainty here is the actual number of houses owned on each unique Ywain1. I pick Ywain1 because it's the most populated and gives us a floor that's closer to the true value. The other primary source of uncertainty is how many people own houses across the three realms. The number of people owning houses on multiple Ywains is less of an issue as I'd be stunned to find out the mean value of Ywain's people own a house on is above 2. I'm willing to guess the true value on that is very close to 1, talking 1.05 or so.
How to tell guild houses from individuals? Any house owned by a name that is shorter than 3 character's, contains multiple capitalized letters, includes a number, or has multiple words, is absolutely a guild name. There are single name guild houses that exist, but in Erikstaad and Wynd I would guess I counted fewer than 5 total guild houses incorrectly. This still gives an error of 10%, but given the primary source of error (multiple houses owned across realms) this is a small error.
tl;dr There are probably 8,000 paid accounts in DAoC. Make of that what you will about the health of the game.
Post edited by Amurdora on
Comments
I didn’t know you could have houses on each ywain. Is that only if you have characters on each Ywain? I thought I was capped at 12 mansions (3 accounts, 4 each realm including guild houses all on Ywain 1).
P.S. Happy New Year bro.
Da fly family - 4501 4502 4503 4504 4505 4506 4508 4509
Da spider family - 441 442 443 444 445 447
Ywain 1 Mid - Carlingford Hib - Tullamore Alb - Dalton
https://divoxutils.com/user-characters
So each active house not owned by a guild on Mid-Ywain1 corresponds to a unique account. Whether those are all individual people or just one person owning all accounts cannot be told, but it doesn't matter as far as estimating the number of paid accounts.
Yeah, that’s true, but what would paid accounts tell you? I’d rather know how many active players.
Da fly family - 4501 4502 4503 4504 4505 4506 4508 4509
Da spider family - 441 442 443 444 445 447
Ywain 1 Mid - Carlingford Hib - Tullamore Alb - Dalton
https://divoxutils.com/user-characters
For less statistically significant reasons than appropriate, but more reasons than I care to type here.
It'll get you to a reasonable number that's easy to calculate. And definately be within a factor of the truth.