a downward trend since august?

there is somthing a little depressing about values in the Y axis probably common to all spring games but especially bad considering how much time has gone into ZeroK.. if you compare the ratio of development man hours to number of regular players, the result is probably the highest of any game ever

Do this stats for once really measure only players or do they count autohosts too?

Zk needs more horse armor..

no really, ZK NEEDS special version of units.

say like a morty with a special explosion effect.. or like say this:

Morty->earn acess to golden morty ->earn acess to double golden morty all the way

or say dominator->dominator scatter shot version(fires a cluster munition)

or even easier

Spherebot -> spherebot black skull ultimate darkeness version..

no really hear me out.

players like special little lapel pins to show off their shit, when they have lots of just visual chaff to unlock people get really into it.. "oh yeah well I earned the black sphere bot, that makes my penis at LEAST 4 inches and manly" etc..

Just food for thought. Or hell even special nuke effects or party explosions..

add some visual chaff that people can wag around online and they will KEEP PLAYING ADDICTED TO THEIR FUCKING PIXELS it works for wow man.

Yeah skins are WIP.. it already works in mod just needs someone to invent what will be skinnable and under waht conditions..

decline is down to many factors, no new major news article, lower (zero) spending on advertising because my credit card got stolen, slower engine/broken pathing/crashing, planetwars down for long periods of time..

Also while decline of ZK was felt, decline of BA appears to be even more dramatic, so much that ZK is now not very far from BA..

lol people are playing gundam..

So you guys do have the alt skin stuff in the works?

Yes, the great King of Raptors already made a gadget that allows you to swap skins :)

I meant earnables.. you know like in cod how people unlock camo patterns etc.

I'm betting that Imperial Winter has you beat there.

Either way, I think ZK is a victim of bad timing - it really came together just in time for Starcraft 2.

it can still make it, I still believe!

We can point to reasons behind the current decline. Planetwars was either inactive or screwed up and we didn't want to advertise with the fairly broken 0.82.7 release.

have they been corrected?

Oh and the Ubuntu update caused 0.82.7 to desync with lost us most of the Linux playerbase.

PW is back and 0.84 fixes the desync. I'm not sure if we are advertising.

We are advertising at low rate atm.. we will likely push after new year when i have more time fixing stuff..

Woop nice to see ZK coming close to toppling BA off the top spot.

Will look to get some games in during Xmas.

Wer misst misst Mist!
Look at the pink "Spring Tanks" or "Conflict Terra" slices, those basically never get played. Still they have an autohost running that gets them to a daily ~1440minutes playtime, which translates to 1,2% or so. wait wut?

So if you want to imagine what happens if one BA autohost is removed, just substract one pink slice from the big green.
If one BA autohosts is removed an one zeroK autohost is added, that probally makes more difference for the stats than anything else.
(remember there is not just one AH per game)
Oh, it also counts players idling in lobby battleroom as playtime.
tl;dr
stats are flawed, not good to meassure real game popularity.

What if the spring tanks host was unlocked?

Stats are flawed but I don't care because they are still a good indicator. Also this doesn't have that flaw and is arguably more useful than playertime.

since http://zero-k.info/ladders/games differiates between specs/players, why wouldn't the same work for the pie graphs?
Also is that "players in game" or "players in battle room"? For the pie graphs it is "in battleroom" iirc.

But generally I think zeroK and BA are even when it comes to popularity. For each game there is always 1 large team match going, sometimes it spills over to a second room. Added to that there are some 1v1s and 1-4 people playing chicken or something.
After all what matters most is how at almost any time there is a game going that you can simply join. So after waiting ~45min for a game to start you can play, without having to organize with other players.
Whether that game is 5v5 with 4 specs or 12v12 with 10 specs is just details.

Nah, there has been no appreciable IW development for 2 years, whilst Zero K has been updated relentlessly