Nathan Meunier said:
@ Klaorkl
I can appreciate your attention to detail and numbers. However, I find no use in squabbling over figures that can fluctuate wildly. TF2 is a popular, well-made game, people enjoy it, and a hell of a lot of folks play it. Enough said.
My statement in the article may have been a bit on the conservative side in your view, but it wasn't presented as a cold hard "fact"; it's simply narrative to set the tone of the piece that was indeed rooted in research. If it makes you feel big and important to dispute that, fine. Pat yourself on the back. Well done.
I didn't throw out any hard figures and say they were golden. The focus wasn't on the specific numbers of people playing; it was on what Valve has been doing to continue to improve their already excellent game. Pardon me.
If you want to spend your time picking apart minor details of people's feature reporting and chalk it up to "the media" not fact checking, then be my guest. Me? I'm going to celebrate a week of historic firsts and get back to work.
Peace.
I agree, the number can flucuate wildly. But so far, those numbers have been at minimum hundreds of servers not dozens.
Dozens would imply its a game thats not one of the most popular, and not a heck of a lot of people play it.
On the other hand, 5000 minimum playing it at any given time means its one of the top online multiplayer FPS games.
For instance:
http://www.gamespy.com/
If you look at the right hand side game player list, right now there are around 75,000 people playing HL1 and its mods, 35,000 people playing hl2 and its mods, and the 3rd place goes to ET: Quake Wars with 6,000 ppl, then 4th is BF4 with a little under 6,000; 5th is wolfenstein: ET which is a free game with about 5,500 people, and 6th is UT2k4 with around 4,000 people.
And at this moment TF2 has 10,000 people
10,273 13,485 Team Fortress 2
That a game thats currently $20 can beat out all other online multiplayer FPS except valve ones is pretty impressive to me.
If you are basing your numbers on the valves server browser, they are flawed as I've explained, in large part because valve's server browser itself is flawed.
If you don't want to belive me, feel free to ask valve themselves, I'm betting they could tell you what the minimum has been in the last week, and I'm also betting its also going to be enough to fill a minimum of hundreds of servers, not dozens.
BTW, if you didn't want to present it as a "cold hard fact", there are ways to do that without saying "dozens" or whatever.
For instance, it could have been:
"Now more than a year after its release, Team Fortress 2, Valve's stylish class-based first-person shooter, is still one of the more popular online shooter games."
Now I'm no writer, so I'm pretty sure you could say something like that in a better form than I could. And just to be clear, I'm not trying to be sarcastic here.
And as well, I overall liked the article. Just that first paragraph bugs me.
