[Graph] Planetside's population relative to August 2013

January saw the ESF update, which probably had a similar effect as the Liberator update with more pilots taking to the skies to try out their new toys. Also the ending of Spring Break may have had something to do with it.

February's WDS event probably contributed to population decline. At least on my home server, Mattherson, the NC esentially boycotted the game during the event because it's simply not fun watching the VS steamroll everyone all the time.

But we can see that there was an accelerated decline in March... which would be the Liberator update. No other in-game factors can explain that acceleration in loss at that particular time. Performance fails as an explanation because that started all the way back in January.

Vulcan, Striker, Marauder and ZOE nerfs.

Those actually happened in December, so the data would suggest that those nerfs (including the Enforcer) did not negatively affect the overall population, or possibly even helped population growth.

Oh. My sense of time on theese things is horrible.

And if thats the case, then Janurary was the Infil update, wasnt it?

January was the ESF Update, the Infiltrator Update was on February 13, 2014. Remember those Valentine crossbows that came out the same time?

not enough data. You should compare same month to previous year not to different part of season. Now its summer and I can predict ~120% in upcoming August regarding to this data.

Thanks.

You know even at 10-11k peak active logins this game is not exactly burning up the charts compared to the typical shooter title with > 150k. Those are weak numbers even against ancient titles like TF2 and CSS that still have a pretty steady 20-50k logins after they've been out for ages.

But at least in January we were closer to the realm of games like EvE that are considered to have stable and healthy, if not particularly huge populations. The fact that we can't even keep 10k players in the game worldwide anymore is just a bad, bad sign.

The steam numbers go all the way back to the beginning, and based on that data the game is hitting new all time lows every week.

A few words of caution here. Our API does not provide a way to directly calculate max concurrent players. I do not know how any of the third-party sites are doing this calculation. My guess is that they are using the "last updated date" information on the player record.

With that said:

1. The month-over-month comparisons look very good. I ran the same analysis and was within 5% of your calculations each month.
2. The actual counts are off by a very large margin, nearing 50% some months. While I cannot share the actual numbers with you, please understand that nearly everyone in the company looks at daily unique and max concurrent player counts. If they were truly that low, we would all be jobless in panic mode.

So in conclusion: Yes, there has been a drop in player population since the beginning of the year, and everyone here is aware of it, but the actual population numbers are not anywhere near as low as what is being reported.

On a side note - if I may ask - what charting product are you using to make your charts? The details are really easy to read, even at small resolutions.

You've missed the biggest ... Amerish update which is what made me return.

Personally the ones that I took notice was
OMFG performane updates
the ending of WDS - yep it gave me a reason not to log in
the introduction of Amerish .... and I returned.

I am not using steam as it causes lag, there was discussion about that in forums and a lot of people started to play non-steam. I can predict that more players are joining non-steam version for better experience. Steam numbers tells nothing.

Good point. I mostly paid attention to things that changed how the game was played, and I didn't pay as much attention to how existing bases were switched around.

When did the Amerish update happen?

Are you allowed to tell us why y'all think the game population is acting like it is?

As far as trends go... that pop INCREASE in the winter makes the least sense and in a way really Offsets the drop this spring meaning the Y-o-Y trend isn't really in a lot of trouble yet. Especially since we can actually explain this spring's numbers with several overlapping factors: Lib Update, Unstable Client in the 64bit transtition, TitanFall and it's 15 minutes of fame, and now several other action MMO's but especially Wildstar (basically ..what... borderlands3 meets WOW? ... which is related in how I'd describe PS2, -- basically WOW + battlefield)

... and just like with ALL F2P's, the infromation we'll NEVER be able to get nomatter what API's or fansite datamining occurs, is the # "WHALE$" still buying stuff and thus propping the entire infrastructure up.

Here's a question that you maybe can answer without giving away actual numbers, and one that often is the subject of some debate:

How close do you find the correlation is between the reported numbers on Steam and your own numbers on total concurrent logins? Are they close and reasonably synchronized in relative terms (i.e., do the Steam numbers represent a consistent proportion of total numbers)? Or are they basically not correlated and likely to vary separately for their own distinct reasons?

Not really. It was soon after OMFG, which was a huge boon to the game and drew a lot of people back in.

Interesting. With all the choices for gamers, SOE needs to keep the game fresh. Gone are the days when you could just publish a decent game and not innovate or introduce new content / expansions. People get bored easily. My theory is they have the new content to release, but their QA is so horrible that every time they do an update, they literally break the game. I mean, it is literally unplayable. I think the lesser of the two evils is to not do ambitious updates, so they don't risk breaking the game and losing players to frustration with server downtime. What you have then is burnout due to boredom.

It's a shame they can't patch the game without totally breaking it.

Thanks for responding!

I didn't realize that the population stats would be so inaccurate, the website i got the info from stated that " "Population shown is the number of characters logged into the server at the specified time." ". I guess lesson learned, don't trust third party sites

(to answer your question, i just took a screenshot from a Microsoft Excel graph )

Taking this in the most favorable possible sense, I'll assume this means that in the months with the highest totals the numbers OP stated are around 50% of the actual counts. So instead of a game with 11k players in January we're talking about one that had more like 22k. And if the error is no more than 50% today, then we're looking at real numbers that are closer to 13k than 6,700.

That does sound better, but not by a whole lot. I mean it doesn't sound like we're talking about the difference between 7,500 players and 75,000 players. From what you're saying, the OP's absolute counts are off by a fair bit, but the undercounting is reasonably consistent, the numbers are still in the ballpark, and the trends are dead on when it comes to relative changes over time.

Considering how many players that play the game are currently in school (Whether High school-College/university) I'm guessing exams have quite a big effect on playtime. (80% of my outfit including me were offline for most exam periods -> Dec, and April for me and May for others in college/uni). January was when we all finished exams lol. Most High schools finish up exams at the end of June, so you'll probably see another spike in July. Again exams won't be this biggest factor on playtime, but I'd say they do carry some weight.