The truth is here! the devs have been lying to you! the greatest deception here is that this is not one game under PCs had it been it would not have been.

the backstory would not have been written by itans

you cannot serve two masters!

the active player graph has been cracked!

Daily


Weekly

cool, more people play than I thought.

inb4 Phaserlock.

I liked the original thread better. But if this thread gets facistlocked too I'm going to start a new thread asking why we can't talk about active player numbers when it gets talked about in every other MMO in the world

Is that all, peypey?

Careful TRS, Big Brother is watching!

(Insert random "1984"/"Jennifer Government" references here.)

wow and half of 'em are West alts

OK, I have to ask how this info was obtained. I could make the same claims with 100x the numbers, or a fraction of them. All Peytros's post shows is that he can draw lines and numbers on an image.

Faille.

momerath is the only unaligned player in game. normally when he logs on he doesn't show up on the active player graph because that would give a scale to it for others to deduce the play count from.

anyways for some unknown reason he was flagged to show up on the active player graph so i saved the images and opened them up in gimp and measured momeraths verticle pixel height and the total height of the graph. momeraths bar is 2 pixels high the top of the graph is 122 pixels from the bottom of the graph 1 player takes up two vertical pixels

you can also see in the weekly graph that momerath stays logged in for over a day and the bars still match up perfectly for the entire graph so no crazy scaling is going on because there are never enough players on at one time to force the graph to accomodate for more than 61.

It is also possible that the bar height has a minimum value of 2pixels (1pixel would be absolute min, but 2pixel makes it more discernible). If that were the case, the values could well be crazy-scaled, and just momerath gets scaled below 2pixel and then up-scaled back to 2pixel to keep it from disappearing.

Not saying this is happening, but it well could be. Either way, 55 simultaneous players would be higher then I've ever seen back when the graph showed actual numbers.

except for the fact that the weekly graph clearly shows a time with no serco online

It's as drazed says; there's a minimum height (for a non-zero value). And I have never been 'flagged' to (not) appear in the graph. I switched to UIT a couple years ago, in part because of this misconception. I regret the impulse to go grey a few days ago, and I'm yellow again.

Yes, ironically, our active players have consistently been higher since we removed the numbers from the graph. Quite a lot higher around the major promos and platform launches that happened occasionally, and for extended periods. We were way over 100 for weeks around the iOS launch, earlier this year; similarly with some of the others.

The funny thing is, I removed the player count stuff after many years of suggestions from the playerbase that I do so. It was suggested that low counts were keeping people from logging on, and causing casual visitors to "write off" the game because they didn't see a player-count number in the thousands. There were lots of suggestions threads, here's an early one from 2004.. but after many others, I eventually listened and agreed.

But, now I'm the Evil Overlord Who Is Hiding The Truth@!# No, it was your bloody idea, and it wasn't a bad one.

So, Peytros, you are not Fighting The Good Fight. Also, your first post included criticism about our choices to do mobile development and our hopes of bringing in new users, which may have had as much to do with Phaserlight moving the thread for review as anything else. My patience with self-righteous bullshit is a bit diminished recently, so he may have been protecting me.. or you from me, heh.

So, yes, big surprise, we don't have 1000 users online. Oh wait, that's not a surprise to anyone, at all. But we do have quite a few mobile users online at any given time, we also maintain graphs of player count by-platform internally, and the mobile platforms have definitely helped with active users. I imagine it would be far moreso if we rolled a free-to-play tier.

This new honest Inc is hilarious and to the point, you should throw old man Business Inc out and keep this one rolling. At least on the forums anyways.

Actually i'm glad you raised the free-to-play tier thing. Please tell me this is on the cards, because I think this is exactly what we need as the next step, specifically, I think you should launch a 'f2explore' update where you release a number of ec-series ships rebranded for exploration as a f2p tier. I was going to suggest it months ago but then the ships thing came around.

Also I know you don't need to be reminded that people only criticize the things they care about most.

I never suggested getting rid of the active player count only the list of player names as it made it too easy to avoid pirates / grief certain players. so i hope that is a general "your"

i thought it was more humorous then anything else that you guys accidently put a scale to it then anything else plus i don't see how my criticism of your mobile sacred cow is anymore spiteful then the countless threads complaining about the focus on mobile users and not on in game content.

and the backstory was still written by itanis

Actually i'm glad you raised the free-to-play tier thing. Please tell me this is on the cards, because I think this is exactly what we need as the next step. I was going to suggest it months ago but then the ships thing came around.

Yes, that is in process, although I don't want to sidetrack this thread to talk about it.

Also I know you don't need to be reminded that people only criticize the things they care about most.

I cut people a lot of slack for that exact reason, but in some cases that has also slid into "I enjoy being a dick online because I get people riled up", which is just a headache. People casting themselves as FIGHTING THE MAN to REVEAL THE TRUTH!@# is another, somewhat smaller headache.

So, I was going to make a newspost today with a screenshot of one of the new tridents. Now I'm doing this. Fantastic.

i thought it was more humorous then anything else that you guys accidently put a scale to it then anything else plus i don't see how my criticism of your mobile sacred cow is anymore spiteful then the countless threads complaining about the focus on mobile users and not on in game content.

Feel free to post your humor in off-topic in the future. Don't clog up general with dumb, false-controversy that sucks up developer time for no reason.

Prioritize Inc, prioritize.

Prioritize Inc, prioritize.

It's our experience that if we don't directly address stuff like this, they'll sometimes spin out of control and become a far greater headache. But yes, I try to prioritize.