Which spring engine game is the most popular in multiplayer

[jianu81]

title

[smoth]

Lazy response filled with belittling language and derisive tone.

[Orfelius]

Explainatory response with scolding smoth's lazines in sarcastic manner.

[8611]

Balanced Annihilation & Zero-K

[Jools]

Why not just log on with a spring lobby and sort the game column with decreasing order. Then you see what is most commonly played. Hint: may involve a delta.

[smoth]

That is too obscure jools, how will he find that unless we tell him that he needs to join the siege?

[PicassoCT]

Lazy response filled with belittling language and derisive tone.

Meandering around, placing Toxic stabs using the exact same word that where used
In another Meta coment while hating on the world for lack of success.
None of the others posting clearly is unbiased, thus there can only be one sollution.
Everyone has to find out for himself.

[Forboding Angel]

<Yo momma multiplayer joke here>

[PicassoCT]

You should sort by name and take the median... protip it starts with j

:)

[abma]

on this server:

1. Balanced Annihilation
2. Evolution RTS
3. Tech Annihilation

http://replays.springrts.com/browse/

[8611]

tl;dr: i was bored and look at this BADSD8v8XxblazeItxX420 but not only.

Just going by the total all-time numbers of http://replays.springrts.com/ can be deceiving.

To me any question regarding popularity implies "what is popular in recent times."
If there was recorded data of the old "Absolute Annhilation" it might well be first or second most-played game, but the relevance to today's players is low.

Another thing is that of course not every match has the same number of players, should be obvious. So I tried to look at that too.
(currently without access to proper stats/scripting tools, so roughly using the count function of text edior instead of actually summing it up etc, which is ofc prone to messing up)

So I limited the time to last three months and also made some notes about things that seemd interessting.
(date range: 2014-12-01 to 2015-02-08)


Balanced Annihilation
total 3072
Duel 921 (30% of total)
420 8v8 (14% of total)
165 7v7
151 6v6
151 5v5
176 4v4
281 3v3
354 2v2
map DeltaSiegeDry 668 (22% of total)
map DeltaSiegeDry 8v8 269 (9% of total)

By far BA has the most played matches.
Somewhere between 30-60 matches are played every day. There is no week or even day without played matches.
Games as large as 8v8 are common but every game-type can be found. (too lazy to count all FFA variants)
The 1v1 or small-teams matches alone easily reach or surpass the total-games of other mods.
A game can be found at 'almost' any time no matter day or clock, without actively searching.
DSD remains popular.


BA Chicken
333 total

part of BA basically.


Tech Annihilation
481 total (16% of BA's total)
142 Duel (30% of total)
104 2v2
62 3v3
24 4v4
11 5v5
229 map blue_fields (47% of total)

The second most played game is already MUCH smaller than BA.
Matches are smaller & fewer than BA but still can go up as high as 5v5 or large FFA 3v3v3v3. (too lazy to count all FFA variants)
Interesstingly this game is the sole reason why the map "blue_fields" is in the top-10 of played maps:
Half the matches took place on this map and no other mod touches it. This is for the real heavy eco.


XTA
331 total
121 Duel (36% of total)
65 2v2
32 3v3
6 4v4
31 map duck (9% of total)

Small game. At this size sometimes there can be days where simply none of the players is online.


Evolution RTS
241 total
207 Duel (86% of total)
22 2v2
3 3v3
147 games by same player (spec+play) (61%)


NOTA
119 total
83 Duel

map stats:
map TitanDuel 32
map Valles_Marineris_v2 20
map Nuclear_Winter 16

Small game.
3 maps make up 57% of total, maybe because map pack.


Imperial Winter
28 total

Rest
There probally were more games played, whose autohosts do not upload or privately hosted.
But no way to check that and I doubt it was relevant numbers.

Facit:
BA is the most popular game, especially in its BADSD8v8 variante. However, that is not the only way it is played.

One should note that the playerbase of every mod is quite small. If five common players do not play for a few weeks it can well have large effect on the number of played matches during that time.
Similiar if there is a problem with replay-uploading for some time it can have large-ish effect, "losing" 50 recorded matches is quite much for some mods.

In a larger playerbase the exotic preferences of a very small number of people would be "lost in an average" but here they matter much more:
"blue_fields" is by no means a normal map, and one would not expect it to be that popular to reach third most played map. That this happend is basically the archivement of 20 or maybe even as low as just 5 people.

The same players play multiple mods.
I did not look at data of this, just something to remember. I assume even the people who do consider BA their "main game" play it from time to time.

zero-K
...is not included because it is not recorded on http://replays.springrts.com/
Maybe in future worth a look but its replay site is harder to look at.
I would expect similiar numbers as BA, with a more diverse mapselection for big team games but a large amount of these maps would be "exotic nonsense" fun maps like Trololo, FinnishFlag, too small maps etc.

Fun fact:

Most downloaded maps according to zero-K
IsisDelta_v02
DeltaSiegeDry
Fields_Of_Isis
Small_Divide-Remake-v04
Small Supreme Battlefield V2
Red Comet
Comet Catcher Redux
Chicken_Nuggets_v4
Archers_Valley_v5
TitanDuel
Nuclear_Winter_v1
Throne v1
TheColdPlace
SuperSpeedMetal
TheRockFinal
There is no way IsisDelta should be such a popular map, it is too controversial for that and not even "featured."

Compared to TitanDuel, which by my perception is a popular map:
IsisDelta Downloads: 45831
Fields_Of_Isis Downloads: 34066
TitanDuel Downloads: 22113
Ofc dl numbers does not played matches.
I think the dl numbers of IsisDelta, Fields_Of_Isis (but also of TitanDuel and some others) are so high because those maps are used in some tutorial/mission/sandbox things.
A quote from http://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/7521 :

This is basically the first map I saw from ZK (maybe after "Running Start"'s Fields of Isis).

Just one quote but it seems realistic to me that the same is true for many players or that existing players tried these missions, too.

(And probally people used zeroKlobby to play non-zK games, which also makes thing fuzzy.)
If one takes away the maps used in missions: look at the list again and see who climbs to the top spot of the most downloaded map.
Behold the King.

[FLOZi]

I can guarantee there have been more than 28 S44 games in that time so the system is far from perfect.

[Forboding Angel]

Same for Evo games actually, but whatever, tbh I simply don't care.

[abma]

it counts only uploaded games so the number are the same or less than games which really were played.

[Orfelius]

Isis delta is a sandbox map Knorke. That would explain it.
And yes it is sadly featured because... reasons I can't comprehend.

Fields of Isis is one of the tutorial maps so yeah :) also slightly commonly played.

Titan Duel however is very popular because it is so awesome that for some time it even was regarded as DSD of Zero-K. It is very commonly played in teams as well as in 1v1s. Kinda same goes for Red Comet.

Oh and no. DSD is not being played very much at ZK nowdays :\ Instead many of its clones are being played such as Rusty Delta and whatnot.

[8611]

That is adressed during the "Facit"...all mods "lose" matches that do not get uploaded because for various reasons...
Of course also other mods and some never appear on replays site and some are only played (or tested) in private battles and that is very nice for people who make/play that and bla-disclamer-blabla but in the end the game numbers are negligible.
Afaik there is no better data and I think for the overall picture it does not change much.

The map-downloads are more fun thatn fact, it is imo too inaccurate except for very rough conclusions..just thought it was interessting.

[Jools]

XTA
331 total
31 map duck (9% of total)

Small game. At this size sometimes there can be days where simply none of the players is online.

Only 9% on duck. It cant count all the test games then when I test the autohost or the test version of the mod. Maybe spads doesnt upload those, or maybe it goes to test.replays.springrts.com.

I would have thought half of XTA games are on duck :)

[8611]

yes..but sometimes duck games are very short and then they do not get uploaded. (limit is 5min or so?)
But it is like with testgames, if such games are not in stats it does not matter so much because they have "low value" and in some way it is more accurate to exclude them.

[Google_Frog]

The top of the ZK site says 1039 games played this month which I assume covers the last 8 days. That is 130 games per day but counts every hosted multiplayer game. I am not sure what the spring replays stats count. There is better data around and someone like Licho could extract it but it could be a bit of a waste of effort.

[8611]

The top of the ZK site says 1039 games played this month which I assume covers the last 8 days.

Do you assume or "assume"? Could it also mean "the last 30 days"? Sometimes things are bit fuzzy like that.

Without access to database data or similiar, imo the only way to get more accurate numbers about zK is to go to http://zero-k.info/Battles and scroll down as far as one wants the date-range to be. Then count the games. Imo that is most trustworthy way because then you know that so every game is an "actually played game" - not averaged from playerminutes or something like that.
(That is similiar to what I did for the numbers of replays.springrts)

However on http://zero-k.info/Battles there is an amount of games that only last few secondes ( http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/330012 ) and even games of longer reported duration are sometimes not "real" games but prematurely closed because one player crashed, teams were wrong,.. etc. or the game time is just displayed inaccurate. But no idea on any numbers or how to tell those games apart.
replays.springrts.com does as far I can see not include such games because they do not get uploaded.

/edit
Actually: Set duration to "0 minutes" and it shows all games up to 5 minutes.
Many of those are imo not serious games, but crashed or aborted.
Also not sure how to classify something like this:
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/329663
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/329661
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/329660
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/329659