CCP, there seems to be alot of debate on how many people are actually playing EVE Online on a daily basis, with lots of suggestions that the system metrics of Active Connections is completely incorrect and misleading due to many players having multiple accounts.
Therefore, is it possible for you to provide metrics on actual unique connections, discarding the players with multiple accounts, and alts accounts.
I understand this might be challenging in some instances, but surely you can provide us (the community) with some realistic and truthful numbers of unique players actually playing the game.
The immediate concurrency figures will always be âmisleadingâ anyway. You could have 10,000 people online for 24 hours. But 20,000 people each online for 12 hours or 40,000 each online for 6 hours, would still give you an average of 10,000 on at any one timeâŚthe latter being 4 times as many people logging in during the course of a day. Thus the length of time people are actually logged in for hugely affects the number online at any one time. Probably more so than alts, multiboxing, etc.
If the same number of people log in for half the usual time, then you will get half the concurrency even with the exact same number of overall players !
When I am not logged in, am I not an EVE online player?
Offline players wonât be counted in the active player number. Does that mean everyone who plays EVE daily but does so for only a few hours is not an EVE online player most of the day?
I do not see how âactual unique connectionsâ is going to be any more helpful than the current number to determine how many EVE online players there are. If anything itâs even more misleading because it says nothing at all, rather than the useful number of âcharacters online at the momentâ.
Perhaps I didnât explain myself very well.
What I mean by âactual unique connectionsâ is actual live data of how many people are actually playing the game at the specific time that I log in, excluding multiple (multi-boxer) accounts.
For example, I open the launcher and in the bottom corner it says: Tranquility (27,787 Players)
But, from what I have read in other posts is that these numbers are incorrect and misleading due to people having multiple accounts and the actual player count is alot less. For example, 6,000 unique players with 21,787 multiple accounts.
So, it would be nice to know how many unique people are actually playing the game at any specific times of the day, and not over the day, as in actual live data.
For gameplay reasons itâs more relevant to know how many characters are playing than how many unique players though. You interact with characters in the game and itâs nice to know when many characters are logged in or when itâs relatively quiet.
While you could also see that from a âunique player countâ but less accurately because that doesnât account for multiboxing, the only other use of a âunique player countâ I see is that players can doom and gloom when the number goes down. Is that something we need?
I personally am tired of seeing doom and gloom and see no reason to make changes specifically to enable more of it.
I get your point.
But, I donât personally care that there are 600 players in NULL space running 10 multiple accounts (characters) blitzing sites. Nor do I care that 400 people are doing FW all with their 7 multi-boxers. I donât care that there are 1,800 players in Jita, but 1000 of those players are their multiple trading accounts. I am only interested in knowing how many actual people are playing the game these days. I am a returning player (2009-2019), but I donât want to put effort into the game if numbers are dropping and more and more people are creating multi-boxing accounts.
It is actually the Doom and Gloom that I am reading these days that is making me question whether EVE is worth coming back to.
Give it a try for some days and see for yourself. You donât need a number on a launcher to tell you whether the playerbase is âalive enoughâ to consider playing.
I did actually PLEX one of my accs and have been trying it - 10 days left. Almost everyone I knew has gone, and the few left now live in Thera - which doesnât sound at all interesting to me TBO.
I thought I would browse forums to get an idea of current state of game, but some of what I read was a little (without trying to add even more Doom and Gloom) concerning, and hence my post.
I have also been checking zKill to try to gauge on activity in game (Null, Low space, with alliances / corps and whatnot). At this point I am unsure whether to PLEX or sub again and commit to getting to know completely new people all over again, especially if there are only 3127 players with their 23,000 multi-boxing chars. I get people have to adapt to change, but this type of change is not very inviting to me - if you get me.
Why should CCP do that? It is in their best interest to show high numbers to motivate people to join in and at least pretend that EVE is a very active, very dynamic and very popular mass-multiplayer onlinegame. Shrinking these numbers by excluding alts would just hurt their business, because it would reveal that the 30.000 âlogged in charactersâ actually are a lot less âreal playersâ.
And even if they did, it wouldnât help you much because after that you could also exclude all those âafk-altsâ that just idle in space or docked at a station for hours which you cannot interact with anyway. Some only waiting for jobs to complete and never undock, some idle in a system day after day after day to feed some thirdparty tool with intel. Would it surprise you if you find out in the end that only 5.000 âreal personsâ are âactively playingâ (= having spaceships undocked and doing things)? What would be CCPs benefit/motivation to publish these numbers?
You raise some good points, but many that I have also considered myself.
If multi-boxing is the New Eve, as so many are articulating (for whatever reasons: FW, Ganking, Homefront, NULL crabbing etc.), then I will happily let my remaining time expire and move on again - yes you can have my stuff.
If however, there is still a large enough community out there (not doing this type of game play) I would happily continue to play and reach our further. Thanks for the reassurance on this Gerard.
I get your points, but for me (I might well be alone here), knowing some numbers could help me decide on staying or not, and truthful numbers would certainly make all the difference to me, and should for any MMORPG TBO.
I guess I still have 10 days to decide and see if I can find any decent groups.
Yep, it was there in my early days of EVE in 2009, and was a big thing when the EQ and WoW players brought it over with them. Strangely, I also knew people who got banned for doing it once upon an EVE - prior to changes in 2015
I was however referring to claims that the extent of it is now affecting the system metrics of how many people play the game.
that only happened due to using IS Boxer and stuff that manipulated the client to the multiboxers advantage⌠ISBoxer can still be used, but certain aspects of it cannot.
i donât recall metrics ever looking at people playing, but characters logged inâŚ
While multiboxing is allowed, not everything you could do to play with such a fleet is allowed. Maybe those people got banned for input broadcasting one command to all their clients at the same time? Or macros?
Current PCU counts highest number of players online at every hour.
Changing that to not count multiboxed accounts does not change anything other than the PCU will be significantly lower.
So I donât get your argument at all. It changes nothing in regards to unique players. They are already accounted in the hourly PCU.
Yes you are right that there is more than 25k players EVE daily. I donât think anyone would be so stupid to not realize that. I wouldnât mind if CCP gave us number of unique players logged into EVE per day stat, but that wonât happen. Just as it wonât happen what OP suggests.
First of all, they donât read this trashbin of the forums. Even if they read it they donât care. And even if they care they will never do this because nobody is doing that anymore not even WoW.
And gaming companies not providing these stats from obvious reasons. There is nothing to bragg about anymore. In fact the lower numbers can easily discourage players from playing. A vicious low player cycle.
Couple of years ago CCP broke something with the launcher after down time, people were unable to log in more than one account. Normally the player count was about 18k within 30-45 minutes of downtime. On that day, the player count was about 5k.
While it was a few years ago, as a rough guide assume 1/3 to 1/4 of the people currently logged is actual bums on seats.
Though in the intervening years a lot of the really bad multi boxing behaviours have been curtailed, eg, there is at least 300 fewer cloaky campers logging in where I used to live, but 300 out of 20k is almost statistical noise.
This estimate assumes that players who cannot multibox will play with a single account instead.
If someone wants to multibox their mining fleet and finds themselves unable to log in the rest of their fleet, I wonder if they would go out in their solo hulk for the day. I doubt it.
Personally, while I usually play a single account, if a game is malfunctioning for the day I would probably play another game instead.
People not playing at all when the game is broken may cause the 1/3 to 1/4 estimate to be too low.