This is a little subjective and inexact: How I see/saw lobby when I log in at weekend EU evenings:
-Two "large rooms": 1x BA, 1x zK. Either large teams or large FFA.
-Two "smaller rooms" for each BA & zK: 2v2-3v3, maybe smaller FFA
-The TechA room, size depending on how stars align
-Smaller mods with few regular players: NOTA, XTA. Busy for a few hours, then nothing, repeat.
-BA Chickendefense room
-A few other mods being irregularly played or tested
-Some 1-3 1v1 games of BA or zK
(Purely based on observations and some screenshots)
The numbers/stats do not fully line up with that:
As said, inexact but for example all the time I see at least one BA chickendefense being played.
So 333 recorded BA-chicken games just seems low. (normal BA is ten times that)
But Chickendefense is often played in private rooms so it is not recorded, which might explain the difference between observation and numbers.
Again, inexact but one should compare stats a bit to what "one thinks makes sense."
Similiar zK having double the matches of BA does not seem realistic because in lobby it seemed about even. Of course that is not excact, but it either means:
a) zK regularly had double the games going than BA. Even if one wants to argue that zK has more rooms..*twice* as many seems unrealistic.
or:
b) zK games only take half the time to finish, so the same active room produces more matches per time. (especially 1v1 on small maps can be very quick?) (still means playerminutes are the same)
or:
c) replays.springrts records "too little" and zero-k.info/battles reports "too much"
bibim's graph seems more closely to reflect what is seen in lobby.
bibim wrote:I'm not sure the number of multiplayer games is the best indicator of "multiplayer popularity". Time spent by players in multiplayer games seems better suited to me.
It was just to me the most easily available indicator
To mind the different #players-per-match I listed how often which type happes.
If one assumes that games have similiar average duration then it seems okayish.
bibim wrote:[img]
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N.B: numbers are averaged of course, otherwise the graph would obviously be unreadable...
edit: actually this graph shows the time spent by players in all games played on the lobby server, not multiplayer games only. So I guess it's still not good to evaluate "multiplayer popularity".
Can you elaborate a bit on that, like what is "time spent by players", does that also counts specs, or players idling in battleroom etc? Can you "zoom" into the april spike?
A far more interesting statistic is that there are so many 1v1 and 2v2 games going on - a scene that used to suffer in Spring.
BA "Duel": 921
zK "Size: 2": 4449
From looking at the lobby I can not explain where the 3500 extra games come from..? It never seemed
that much more active to me.
It would not surprise me if a large part of the 1v1 games was played by a small number of people, devs or long-time players like Anarchid, GF, Godde, Drone playing each other:
One should keep in mind that the absolute numbers are not that high, a handful of dedicated players can easily drive up the percentages. (also see: TechA's blue_fields)
1v0ry_k1ng wrote:Oh, in what circumstances is a game not recorded?
The most relevant factors are imo:
-aborted games: replays.spring does generally not have them because autohosts do not upload them.
( On zero-K/battles one can filter them out by duration but not sure how trustworthy it is, there are many cases that seem strange.
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/330044 - "Duration: 80 seconds" but players "died in 4 minutes" )
-private games: zK counts them, replays.springrts does not.
Any battle that in zK is named "XYZ's battle" (
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/330035 )
would not show up on replays.springrts because hosting works different.
Would be interessting to see zK-numbers with only "official hosts", without the private ones.