Some Planetside 2 statistics

OK! Since people apparently don't read I've removed the last 7 days from that activity graph. Since "activity" in this calculation is based on just the first and the latest login date, any number for e.g. yesterday will be very misleading. Just because a character hasn't logged in for two days doesn't mean it's inactive (but it could be!).

What to read from the activity graph:

It does not represent daily logins. It represents the number of characters that have had been created before that date and would log in at least once again.

It does not represent active players but characters. Since each player can have up to three characters, the number of unique players will be lower, although I suspect that most players only have one character.

The current number of active characters appears to be just under 300,000 and has been there for the past 4 weeks or so, most of february, basically. So, no, it does not look like PS2 is losing players at the moment. It has however already lost a good number.

After launch, it peaked at around 550,000 then quickly dropped to ~320,000. December saw a steady climb for the first few weeks but the holidays brought it back down to ~400,000. In January activity picked up slowly again but by mid-January it turned around and it fell to ~300,000 where it is now.

Note: This approach is not ideal for determining which characters are active but the data API doesn't expose any detailed information about which days a characters logged in, etc. and this is the best I could come up with. The same goes for the issue of characters vs. players but even if the numbers are lower by some x factor, the trends remain.

Haha, yes I recognize your name too.

Can you clarify what data your received from SOE and what filter you used to create the daily "active users" column?
I was under the impression that the data showed any character with a difference in playtime from one day to the next, which would imply that character had logged-in.

The data I really want is concurrent players by time, with maybe a daily average, but SOE is not likely to release those numbers.

A characters activity period ranges from the date of its creation to the date of the last login.

So, for any given date X a character is counted as active if:
It was created on or before date X AND it logged in on or after date X

Vice versa, for any given date X a character is counted as not active if:
It was created later than date X OR it last logged in earlier than date X

Does that clarify it?


As for your request for concurrent players, yes that would be nice. There doesn't seem to be any way to get those number, though.

Yes, thank you. But even knowing that, the data still suggests a serious population decline.

i'm actually interested in the player rank distribution.

with so many people having a high BR on the forums, i figured that far more players were in the upper eschlons than actually were

Explain to me how losing 2 players per every 100 is a huge loss, you telling me that 98 players can't beat 102 players? if you sum the total they may be a lot but still insignificant against the total population.

And? If is not the same then in some servers VS is decreasing while in others is increasing.

Active players count has been going down in a constant rate.

and in game experience too. i rarely see br<10 i see a lot more 20-40.

The people on the forums are not exactly a representative sample of the total population. Generally, the people that frequent the forums are the more active players so it follows that they would be higher ranked the rest.

Well, you probably don't see the BR<10 characters because most of those have stopped playing long ago.

That's in a single month, if the trend continues player ratios will soon be completely out of whack. So yes a 4% deviation a month is a large amount.

This game dying incredibly fast.
Huge drop in active players right after GU2. All these stupid buff this crap and nurf that crap is really not helping popularity of this game. Instead off buffing and nurfing BS, Higby and Co. should have concentrating on improving performance of the game and banning hackers.
If this continues, in three month we will have 2 US, 2 EU and 1 AU servers with one populated continent each.

except one of the first pages shows something like 5-10k new characters per day. where are they hiding? that also means that if the populatiin is stable, but gaining new characters ee must be bleeding off higher lvl toons somewhere. im just not seeing that reflected in game.

The game itself has many faults and some of us find the gameplay quite boring so people stop playing.

This game suffers badly under the snowball effect since this game requires more people to get everything out of it. If people start having less action, they want to play less. Like the devs have said, players are the content...but what happens when players don't play? The content goes away and for every person leaving, the remaining people have bit more reason to stop playing themselves. I roughtly shoot 50% less people each game session than I did on first weeks, which slows down my cert gain.

The game doesn't have any focus to it either so in the end you could have 200 players split between 10 hexes, turning this game to Halo in over-sized map.

http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&appid=218230&from=1361212013

Grid marks are from 6am to 6pm UTC. Lucky to make 7K Monday tops

That depends of the time scale, if we say that a 10% loss of Vanu is a lot (from 33% to 23%), this trend will have to continue for 5 months. In 5 months SOE's roadmap should be complete, so anything can happen during that time.

OMG there are more than a million charecters? that means at least 1million accounts. I didnt expect this many people registered. I always feel that there are about 1000 people on each server and there are at most 10 ish servers, making the total player count somewhere below 20,000, and start to wonder how SOE manage to profit from this game. I love this game and I subscribe to it so that it can last as long as possible.

It doesn't really say anything about what kind of characters are leaving, it could just as well be that all the new players sign up and never play again. I could probably try to identify how long people tend to stick around before stopping.

Perhaps you could put together a few graphs proving that PS2 is doomed and will be into negative population in a few weeks; to satisfy the people who want to see this happen and prevent them from misinterpreting data until they get it.

CupBoy can you do the Graphs/Stats without the first few BRs? It seems like a large part of the Graphs are BR 0-10, if we leave them out we could get a better look at the "avtive" playerbase (no "twinks", no "just taking a look").

Or does the API not allow such queries?