I know. This is simple math. I am not sure why you aren’t getting it.
Well, if you didn’t get my explanation before, let me try one last time.
This is a made-up dataset using a sine function:
The data here is the complete data set and as expected the average is around 0 as you would expect (0.028 to be precise). You can take the average of this it is does reflect the underlying process as you have sampled it fairly.
If however you compress your sampling and start combining your data points using a maximum function, you will completely skew the average. Taking these exact same data points and reducing them by 1/3 by taking the maximum of each three points, you get something that looks like this:
The average is 0.595 now and completely wrong. The underlying data is the same as the previous curve, just combined via a maximum function, but now the average of these max projection points does not reflect the original data at all.
This is exactly what Eve Offline is is doing. If you look at the datapoints, they have the full time stamp and you can see that for the time interval for the data is about 30 minutes for the one week charts (so the max player counts in a 30 minute window), and over a day by the time you expand to the one year chart (so the data points are the max players over the course of a full day or more). Since @Chribba is tracking the maximum player count during these time windows, it makes sense for him to choose the maximum player count value to display when changing the sampling window size like that, but as a side-effect people keep missing for years now, that means the averages are not comparable between different sampling windows. You only can compare the average data when sampled with the same time window.
Look, I am going to draw the 24k average you claim for the last month on the 1 year chart in green:
How does that match the data? My best eye-balled average (in red) is somewhere around 31k, which ok, does seem to be down slightly from the 1 year average, but still well in the noise and above the January/February 2020 average we started the year with.
The 24k number is simply because more of the data points reflect quiet times of day revealed by taking smaller sampling window sizes. When you look at a year, these datapoints are combined and only the maximum is used in the average.
Overall activity, at least judged by this metric isn’t down. Maybe specific areas of the game are, or other metrics might show something different as the PCU isn’t the greatest metric, but that is the point. This metric is dubious at best, and doesn’t even show what you claim.