You hear all the talk about numbers dwindling, and honestly to me it seems to be holding steady currently. I've taken a break for a few months and when I come back the same amount of people tend to be online as there was when I last played.

Was curious if perhaps one of the Imms would be able to give an idea of the number of different people playing on average through a week? Not characters, but actual players. I know even if you did this by IP there'd be some margin of error as some people will play from different IP's as I do during a given week.

My first set of characters (the ones I actually learned where Arkham was by doing the Academy map quest, how to get a boat) were in 2007.

At that time, a vocal and often entitled-feeling minority were SCREAMING about the dwindling player base, yelling and whining at the immstaff, saying things like "well, you've lost me forever! That's another player gone, and the game can't afford to lose any more!." There was a claim that Valguerna (Sp?) was actually one person playing all of the immortals behind different aliases. ETC.


I then took a break for FOUR YEARS because of real-life.

Basically, peak times today are the same or better as then. And the game is much better. It is more interesting, new areas, better coded. A few of the biggest jerks have left, and as a result a newbie can get to level 30 without full eq replacement 20 times.

As a fellow noobish person, I would say to entirely ignore most of those type of complaints on the forum. Almost everything not stated by the staff is partly rumor, mistakenness, and misinformation. The staff is limited by ethics and sanity not to constantly respond.

Has been about the same for years now. There was indeed a point where 100+ characters seemed to be on at all times except very late night, but that was long, long ago.

It could also manifest itself as players logging on less and less often. More characters just showing up once every two weeks, and then just popping out of existence.

Occasionally people pop back in. I usually periodically pop back into CF, play a lot for awhile, and then end it when I'm burnt out. CF is serious business and it's really hard to build a successful, interesting character if you don't have the time to invest, or if you don't enjoy yourself while investing.

>You hear all the talk about numbers dwindling, and honestly
>to me it seems to be holding steady currently. I've taken a
>break for a few months and when I come back the same amount of
>people tend to be online as there was when I last played.

From an online users perspective, it's been pretty constant for awhile. Since January 2010 until October 2011, the max users on a given day has been between 40-60 most of the time.

>Was curious if perhaps one of the Imms would be able to give
>an idea of the number of different people playing on average
>through a week? Not characters, but actual players. I know
>even if you did this by IP there'd be some margin of error as
>some people will play from different IP's as I do during a
>given week.

It's not something I'd even know how to track reliably. I personally log in from 3 completely different IP's depending on where I'm at. Toss in dynamic IP addresses, proxies, etc. and it's just not worth trying to figure out.

I focus on the combination of the in-game users & users playerbase commands. Users playerbase shows the number of player files that exist over the last 52 weeks, and it's been consistently between 800-1000, with most weeks in the 900's.


>
>

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

nt

Assume people are lazy and re-use the same password for all their characters.

Pull the number of unique passwords. there will be some crossover of different people inadventantly using the same one but it should be interesting. (yeah I know you likely don't store passwords as their actual strings but its just a thought)

My Carrion Dashboard just hit 300 downloads

It's a very, very gradual dwindle.

I haven't noticed much of a change in the last several months. But numbers were a little stronger at the beginning of the year, and they've definitely slid some from last year/two years ago. I think the evening out of the slide has something to do with threshold (dedicated players that will never go away) and also with replacement (we're better at replacing lost players recently via advertisement than we have been)

Peak times are still solid - but peak hours seem to be shorter this time around, too.

It's just this really long gradual thing thing that has been happening forever - and it's not a straight line slide, either.

Splntrd