Some Planetside 2 statistics

With the new data API up, I spent a bit of time looking over some of the data to see some trends and thought you guys might be interested. For now, I've mostly been looking at character creation, activity and ranks.

Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AmUavphHXmIxdFhHUzJfN1VYalRnWS0xMnBUdTJpM1E&output=html

There's also a bit of discussion over on /r/planetside

It's still a work-in-progress, so I'll be adding and moving stuff around.

Looks nice. Since this is characters and not players, I guess it's safe to assume that the recent drop in VS pop overall can be attributed to people playing their TR/NC chars instead.

Also, I guess most people have one char on each faction, even if they don't really play them a lot, which would skew the results in favour of a more balanced result.

I recommend running a filter and removing all chars that are BR <20 or so to get an idea of people's mains.

EDIT: I also like how on the "Average ranks" sheet you mispelled TR sum into TR scum! Spot on

Lolz TR scum instead of sum on average ranks

I'm assuming this was intended, either way, please keep it that way

130h of gaming in a week ??? :O That only gives 40h of sleep/eating/mastubating (I'm biased against anyone who can play that long)

Well, I don't really like to assume things.

But it definitely would be nice to see numbers for actual players and not just characters. However, removing low level characters like that is that would be throwing away, like, 90% of the data.

I did a double-take when I saw that number as well, that's some serious dedication. It could be an error in the data, I guess, I can't guarantee that SOE's data is valid.

Well if you have the time you could just make a separate faction population sheet removing at least up to BR 10. Yes, it's almost 90% of the data but since you can see on the creation date sheet that most chars were created in November, anyone who hasn't gone past BR 10 in 3 months can be safely disregarded imo.

It's interesting how even the distribution is between factions.

130 hours a week? That's some seriously sad mother****er.

So the VS active population has be steadily decreasing since release while NC has been increasing since the last 3 weeks.

You're looking at a graph with percentage values that doesn't go from 0 to 100% in the X axis, the decrease is a mere 2% tops.

130h could be a shared account, it happens enough in other games to get to the top of the leaderboard.

And I don't have multiple characters it is enough work for just one to unlock things, dividing playing time between three unless you buy the upgrades would be pointless.

The initial state of the game would have put a lot of people off as well, I had 4-6 weeks off and only started playing again last week.

It is starting to resemble a playable game, but there are still so many things wrong with it creating a free account and then uninstalling isn't too far a step away and you lose nothing.

If it counts characters, not players, I'm contributing to all factions.

That said, if it is this even it is a shame we do not have one mega-server. I realise this would require one beast of a server but yeah.

Looks like the NC is getting a fresh injection of talent.

Thank you for running the numbers Cupboy

I looked up the rest of his data and the character looks a bit... sketchy. Has played for two week and put in around 270 hours, almost exclusively as engineer. Less than 250 kills and at rank 41.

What is see from this is that a lot of Vanus are playing NC now.

I'm more concerned with the loss of active players in general.
~435k this time in January down to 122k in February

Even previous active player dips were in the 300k range.

ETA: Just looked at it again and read the note about disregarding the last seven days. Overall active pop is still down though.

This is why statistics can be skewed to represent whatever you want, people look at the pretty lines instead of the numbers. If you look at the values there's at most a 2% decrease of VS activity, that's 2 players out of 100, that's not a lot.

I also find it interesting that the VS/NC active population started to diverge prior to GU2 while the TR active pop remained relatively flat.

I'd be more interested in the why since it did start prior to GU2 and seemed to just continue after that.

Would be cool to see some of the active character data at the server level too. I suspect that some servers suffer from more than a couple percentage points loss.

It seems that the bugs and general problems right after GU2 had a significant negative impact on the number of active players (second to last sheet).