Runes Of Magic Nets 700,000 Players

Frogster's 'Runes of Magic', which officially went live yesterday, has had 700,000 players register to take part in the free to play MMO.

To cope with all the extra traffic, Frogster had to open another European server, which means there are now a total of nine servers running in English and German. On the busiest servers, 'Laoch' and 'Aotacht', character creation by new players has had to be capped until further notice. In anticipation of more RoM players signing up, Frogster has additional servers on hand to deal with the extra workload if needed.

[Maticus]

That's amazing, almost as many as Warhammer Online when they launched, over twice as many as WAR has now lol.

[Leord]

Yeah. While less might stop playing than a pay-to-play mmo, the numbers might also be inflated for the same reason...

[Malfurion]

That's a very valid point about the F2P model, along with the fact that people have no subscription to sign up to after the first free month.

[AndyA]

Wow, that's a lot of players. Wonder how many will stick around

[Fyzzu]

Pretty big launch, but then again it's free to play, and MMOs always have huge launches. We'll see how it's doing in a month or two.

[Leord]

Yeah, but difference here is that people don't have to renew subscription after trial period. I'd assume a lot less will stop playing than WH or other mmos.

[Malfurion]

Considering the amount of content these guys have planned for this game, I'd be surprised if the numbers drop off much.

They've crammed an enormous lot of gameplay and features into it already, with more to come. Put that together with an almost flawless beta and you have a pretty big success if you ask me.

[ud]

Almost flawless beta? Don't want to sound rude, but did you even play it? Even the open beta was still filled with bugs, quests and some text not even translated, a couple of skills are bugged and still don't work properly, chests in lvl 35 instances dropping level 1-5 stuff, etc.

While the gameplay is great, the game has balancing issues, especially higher level.

[Leord]

Wow, that is really awesome! I wonder how they count players though. I know WoW does it with active subs, which is quite reliable.

[Maticus]

It's simply the number of people who have registered.

[syrinx]

Yeh figures at this stage don't mean too much

[Malfurion]

Not on subscription MMOs, F2P ones are different. People sign up to them a lot quicker, and the lack of subscription means they're more likely to stay.

[Maticus]

Nah, I agree with syrinx, these figures mean nothing. With all the hype, people have just registered and downloaded it to check it out. Give it a few months then compare numbers.

[Medievaldragon]

Interesting. This got more players than other MMOs. And I haven' event heard of this one before.