Gauging subscriber numbers in an MMO that doesn’t want to reveal them is difficult. Although it is possible to go through a company’s financial reports and make an estimation based on income, you still won’t end up with a hard number. Gold farmers, on the other hand, are an excellent indicator of how well the game is doing. An easy formula to remember is that as presence and force go up, the population goes up with it. In Aion, for example, gold farmers see the game as such a lucrative market that they are doing everything short of breaking into the NCWest offices armed with pistols, in order to push NCsoft back and keep selling to the community.
So launching to one million accounts aside, if I had to gauge Star Trek Online’s success by how many spam bots I had to put on ignore this morning in-game, I’d have to say the title is doing well for itself. Cryptic also appears to be doing a decent job of banning the bots, as almost all of the accounts I put on ignore were banned by the time this article is coming out.
More on Star Trek Online as it appears. Oddly enough, I don’t remember Champions Online having this issue. Maybe gold farmers hate super heroes.
MMO Fallout 