Ha well just trying to find a reasonable solution because no god damn way 3000 players are on at 1 am pacific time..

Frogboy didn't do that one.

Then simply put there is something wrong with the stats.  You either don't log off people as you should or something else.  There is no way that 85% of the people have Demigod running and logged on to server, but still not joining or playing games.  I mean, it's not like they can chat ingame... So how about for once paying attention to what people are obviously showing with facts.  There is no way that the opengames.asp pages is showing correct numbers!  Either it doesn't show all games or it shows more people online than there really are... simple as that.

Perhaps that count includes double instances if a person is logged into chat as well (1 for chat and 1 for demigod - idk)?  Oh well, the presented stats at least appear to accurately show current running games and open games... I don't think any of us doubt that number. 

I know about the impulse overlay... but it hasn't been working for me forever...  EXCESS FLOOD error.

Besides, if people were in the chat, they'd show in the irc channel too.  Or maybe there is a secret society of 2500+ people that use stardocks irc server via impulse overlay inside Demigod and chat in their own channel... yeah, that's it.

Oh shit boys, Misfortune's on to us!

1am pacific time is not 1am around the world.

Why people find this so hard to believe is beyond me.  With all of the complaints about people that go afk DURING a game, and you can't believe that a lot more people actually do go afk before trying to get in a game...

It's interesting to see how people were perfectly willing to use the same data when it was only 1 of the 8 servers to show that the game was "dead" but when we sum the # of users on all the servers it's suddenly impossible.

In order to be counted as being online, the user has to logon and their game has to respond every 30 seconds or so to a ping/pong request.  

When someone logs in, they are assigned to one of the 8 servers. The old stat page had only the server from the beta. The new stat page combines them. It's the same data.

these numbers seem completely reasonable to me. There are quite a few time zones and quite a few people throughout the world. Not to mention, yes there are a huge number of poeple that unfortunately will only play single player because they are too scared or unable to play online.

For some reason I notice more games hosted on Impulse compared to when I'm logged into Demigod and viewing the games through Demigod. Does Demigod filter far off games or games with different languages?

Istari, thanks for the info. But why does it take so long to fill up games? Why are there so little games open?

I am sure this phenomenon interests you as much as it interests us.

Istari, I for am not saying I don't beleive the data. I'm just asking for explanation about the discrepancy of players in game and players online.  The stats regularly show 85% of the people online not playing.  You have to admit it's a bit weird, so maybe worth looking into.

Stats make sense to me. It's easier to believe that there are thousands of people afk or between games and not in lobby than to believe the Stardock would outrightly try to lie to us about their numbers. I sometimes just sit there in custom games screen just clicking refresh, hoping for a game that looks good. Eventually I host a game if I can't find one, but I also go afk after logging in etc. I'm sure in a country with millions of people, there's bound to be a few thousand that do the same as me.

This only 1 of 8 servers was only for the total players online though I think. Because you have always seen all open games in the list, and the amount of games open/ in progress hasn't changed much since the revamp of the opengames page.

More interesting than the total amount of players online is the number of players currently in matches (or in pre-match lobby or in waiting list for automatch) - Would be nice to have a sum of that numbers instead of having to manually add them up

I totally agree.  If SD says the data is accurate then ok.  But please don't take offense if we ask for some clarification. 

There is no explanation. It is exactly what we have seen in every game.  If you check on the Steam stats page, you will see the same thing with games their too where it will display thousands of people are online in the game but they're not necessarily currently in games. They are lurking but we do not know what they are doing.

There are similar statistics for Supreme Commander that are available with much the same behavior. 

What we can do is also display the # of people actually in games.

When the game first launched this number was much much higher (15,000 or so).  Then it went much lower when the connection problems happened. Then it rebounded when v1.01 came out and has been slowly growing since.

Thanks, Istari.  I was hoping you'd make a followup post.  I'd like seeing that # of people actually in games stat if its not that big a change on your side.  That's for the historical reference as well regarding the stats. 

http://supcomdb.com/stats/

The Ratio of players online / players playing is 2:1 (or 50% of people online (e.g. logged into GPGnet) are playing) in SupCom not 15 to 25% as in Demigod.

I

These stats are weird. Demigod is a very low population game. I have no idea how they sold so much and yet so little people are online as it is (in essence) a multiplayer centric game.

At the moment of writing this post... so called "2106 players" are online but only 157 are actually inside games, playing. This is baloney. Less than 10% in game while 90% are lurking? Is Demigod the new screen saver? Come on. Something is wrong here.

Sure, Demigod can access the chat rooms of Impulse via the ImpulseOverlay too, but there aren't as many people in the chat as the stats might indicate and the chat is accessible via Impulse or simply via an IRC client too. There aren't any other reasons in Demigod other than playing or maybe chatting, yet the percentage of "lurkers" seems to be much higher in Demigod.

Thanks for the information Istari -  the thing I was most interested is that you only count people logged in to the server via Demigod and have a 30s heartbeat.  It's a bit weird that people on average spend 3+ hours lurking for every game played (30 minutes), but I guess we cant discuss people's habits...

EDIT: Hmm, just checked steam stats...

You know, you can actually log into multiplayer, but then hit back, back, to get to single-player, without ever logging back out of multiplayer. Maybe some people are playing single-player without logging out? Dunno. Just a thought. Hard to imagine that would count for such a disproportionate number.

It's all a conspiracy.  You guys, who are clearly staticians, mathematicians, software engineers, computer scientists, and all manner of other relevant occupations, clearly have the experience to say the numbers are fudged or even "off a bit."  It is clear that your superior reasoning and logic chain, which is so elaborate that you cannot even put it down on paper for us to analyze, is much more reasonable than simple programatic functionality to track these things.

No, indeed, you are right.  It is a conspiracy contrived by Stardock and GPG to make their game seem like it has only a modestly small population instead of a smallish population.

Please also tell me about how 9/11 was done by the lizardmen of the US government and how THAT VAN is ALWAYS falling you and you JUST KNOW they are watching you.

In other words: back up your arguments with reasonable logic.  There is absolutely no reason to think they would be fudging numbers, let alone fudging numbers in such a way that doesn't even make them look good.  Let's not forget that if they wanted to fudge numbers, they could EASILY add games to the game list to actually make them look far more active.  But no no, you guys are right...it is definitely a conspiracy.

Edit: And yes, GPG, please put in a "Players in game" stat anyway.