Noone left to play - impression and reasons of/for decreasing player numbers

[Black_Pedro]

@Cod_Black1

When you go to https://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility you see the following average numbers.

Last year 33k
6 month 32k
3 month 27k
1 month 23k
2 week 22k
1 week 23k

Since people keep trotting this out, let me try to debunk this mistake once and for all.

The reason there is an apparent decrease in average numbers is completely and artefact of the sampling time of the data. Since the data being returned is the maximum PCU, the shorter the time range, the more data points are from lower activity times of day. This is obvious from the two extremes:

In the weekly, you can clearly see the daily low PCU times of day, and even downtime.

In the yearly, these low activity times are not present nor calculated in the average. All you can see is the weekly change in activity over the days. The resolution is not sufficient to include the low PCU times of day.

If you want, you can make and apples-to-apples by playing with the window below the main graph and set a window of the same time range. But it isn’t even necessary… just look at the 1y graph with my eye-balled averages foe 3 month periods:

I don’t know what exactly each quarterly average is, but it ranged from 30k to 35k for the entire year of 2020. And the lowest quarter was the first one.

@Cod_Black1

I only see a relativly strong decrease of player numbers. In the meantime I can feel it. Actually is Corona lockdown in Europe. So normally the player numbers should go up as in March. We live in Nullsec. A few month ago our small corp had regulary >40 people in the chat. Today there are 15 and this is the “new normal”. Same for the Ally. In the ally primetime there used to be more than 300 in the intel channel - now its around 200.

So no, the numbers don’t reflect your feelings. You may be entirely right that your corp/alliance/coalition is “dying” but the game is doing just fine, better than at the beginning of last year.

But don’t fret, the latest devblog addressed points 1, 2 and 3 of yours. I think 2021 will come with goodies and be a more active year for you and your group, at least if you are willing to fight for your space.