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Etherdrifter

Long Term Player Count Observation

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So, I've been playing wurm for quite a while.  Actually, longer than I thought given how many logs I have buried in my system!

 

I got bored today, and thought doing some data science might be fun.  The result is the graph below, showing the monthly average number of players online each time I logged in over the past 6 years (feel free to mail me cakes!).  The 0 entries are months of hiatus, of course, and some of the early steep fluctuations are months where the servers had problems.

 

 

Wurm-player-count-data.png

 

The overall picture is one of decline; however most notable point of decline was during 2015, magically around the month of WU's release (October saw a massive player drop).

 

This isn't really data that allows us to draw any conclusion, since alting on wurm became massively prevelant after the release of WU.

 

If you want to find out how I processed the data, it's in the spoiler tab below.

Spoiler

 

The data was prepared by dumping all my event logs into a single folder, and then running the following terminal command


grep "totally in wurm" *.txt > output.log

This then gave me a series of strings of this form "_Event.2013-09.txt:[18:36:15] 82 other players are online. You are on Release (654 totally in Wurm).".

 

From here it was just a bit of text editor and excel magic to get the average of each month and put it into the lovely chart you see above!  (I used the AVERAGEIF function in excel)

 

 

If anyone has more records and would be interested in combining their data, reach out and let me know.  Otherwise, enjoy!

Edited by Etherdrifter
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31 minutes ago, Etherdrifter said:

This isn't really data that allows us to draw any conclusion, since alting on wurm became massively prevelant after the release of WU.

Shortly after WU came out I stopped renewing Premium on 2 of my accounts and just continued to pay for Premium on my main account. Also I disbanded a few deeds since I was spending the bulk of my time playing on the WU servers. Then after some more time playing WU I started playing WO about the same amount of time. Now I am playing mostly WO with 3 accounts Premium and revived 2 deeds during this time period.

 

My thought is that after WU was released many WO players went to try it out. Some never returned to WO. Others like myself play both and some always stayed with WO never even trying WU. The main thing that distorts player count statistics in WO is as you indicated the use of alt accounts, although this has always been the case before WU as well. Only someone within the Wurm staff that can view the individual player information can make some sense of this number of total players in contrast to just alts being phased in and out during various times for certain reasons. Even then players can pay for alts with different emails and anonymous payments such as gift/cash cards which disconnect real players from just alts of the same player.

 

So in the end only total game revenue is what counts as some indication of the current success of the game and that monetary profit information will never be disclosed to the common Wurm player or I imagine most (if not all) of the Wurm staff as well. So I would agree with you that this data does not allow us to draw any substantial conclusions of any accurate significance.

 

=Ayes=

Edited by Ayes
spells stuff

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I took the liberty of using the convolutional neural network from my thesis on this data, in conjunction with my own records and player count information on the website, to predict the number of players that will be online in the future. Here are the results: 

Spoiler

87JS5sw.png

 

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4 minutes ago, darthryan said:

convolutional neural network

Watch out for those convolutions! They will mess up your neural network pretty bad. Just looking at the acceleration rate tells me that the g-force will compress all logical thought into an infinitesimal amount of cognitive space from which there is no return.

 

=Ayes=

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26 minutes ago, darthryan said:

I took the liberty of using the convolutional neural network from my thesis on this data, in conjunction with my own records and player count information on the website, to predict the number of players that will be online in the future. Here are the results: 

  Hide contents

87JS5sw.png

 

 

Do you also have Bitcoin projections? 

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18 hours ago, Etherdrifter said:

I got bored today,

General sentiment when grinding. Can relate.

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As Jackal has proven, there's not a lot of new players.

 

We've almost completely lost the influx of new players we were receiving, all that's left is the vets.

 

The problem with this is they have no idea what a player in this day and age coming into wurm for the first time wants to experience out of wurm.  They also don't know what made people leave. The game is designed purely for the vets, every change that is made is to please the vets.  There is almost no effort to keep new players, to make the new player experience better, and to modernize and grow the game into something that now day gamers would play.  It's a stubborn game that refuses to adapt and continues to slowly die.

Edited by jonsnow
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Quote

The data was prepared by dumping all my event logs into a single folder, and then running the following terminal command


grep "totally in wurm" *.txt > output.log

This is... just so.. totally wrong...

 

Why?

You logged at 1 random time and checked /who or .. total number of online players as a whole... which could be partially alts prem or not... which is should not be called 'player count', cute random observation but the number is random and shows nothing than online numbers you tracked over a period at random times(even if it was done at specific hour every week on your end)

 

Wasn't it easier to check mrtg and dump things from there? You'll see peak hours with most players online, premium player count and least active hours of the day/week, which is probably something for devs to use when planning events 🤫

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17 minutes ago, jonsnow said:

As Jackal has proven, there's not a lot of new players.

 

We've almost completely lost the influx of new players we were receiving, all that's left is the vets.

 

The problem with this is they have no idea what a player in this day and age coming into wurm for the first time wants to experience out of wurm.  They also don't know what made people leave. The game is designed purely for the vets, every change that is made is to please the vets.  There is almost no effort to keep new players, to make the new player experience better, and to modernize and grow the game into something that now day gamers would play.  It's a stubborn game that refuses to adapt and continues to slowly die.

I do not agree you can make that conclusion from jackal. Jackal were mostly made for old players.

 

I am a vet and why am I still here? In my view wurm have changed since I started and not for the better in general. Only the players keep me here.

The big challenge in my view is to not lose the soul of wurm and same time improve wurm. Wurm is a niche game and I think it should stay that way.

There is a lot of room for improvement without chasing the vets away, and it not necessary to make everything easier and easier as I feel many "improvements" have focused about, and it didn't attract more players maybe even the reversed.

 

Why should it be a contradiction to keep vets and attract new players?

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The problem is there's so much stuff to fix to make easier/better in order for it to affect whether new players stay.

 

For example, I recently came back and was doing cloth tailoring.  I have to convert, only small amounts at a time... into string.  Why can't I convert large amounts?  There's no device for this?  This is called gameplay, constantly hitting create over and over?  

That's where Wurm has always failed.  IT thinks gameplay is clicking a button over and over.  This is simply not the case.  There's just so much tedium, and not a lot of substance.

 

The other issue is there's no end-game.  Reach 100 in a skill after ten years?  Congrats, there's been nothing new to build for the last 40-60 points.  You can build a higher QL barrel.

To add on to that, the lack of information all over the place really retracts from the experience.  I gain 10 points in blacksmithy, but there's no tooltips telling me how my weapons have improved with 10ql, or how my tools have improved.  I made a rare, but I have no idea how it improved the item if at all.  This really makes the experience feel empty and progress feel slow.  

 

Then the other issue is travel time is hard enough as is, on xan it's even worst.  Forget about meeting up with someone on the other side of the map.  If there was a way we could travel specifically to each others towns, without having to manually do it...  autopilot if there's a highway?  Maybe this is already a thing, but I find it so annoying having to try to navigate a wilderness that looks identical everywhere.

 

The big one for me was that as skills got better, the daily grind didn't really improve.  You still had to weed your plants etc every day and it gets to a point where it just feels like a choir in a video game.  In games like Harvest Moon as you develop and move further into it you acquire new and improved versions of the same tool that make the day to day less tedious and give you incentive to continue.

 

Also, the lack of Animal variety for breeding and PURPOSE is a big issue.

 

Then there's the skill grind.  I feel like Jackals grind is PERFECT for Freedom, but for a temporary server it still seems too slow!  

The average person just doesn't have a ridiculous amount of time to grind and grind and grind...  Most of us have 3-4 hours a night, if that to play a video game.  To compete for our time, which is exactly what a business should be trying to do...  You have to make the game compelling, and that players can achieve something and feel progress in 3-4 hours a night.

Edited by jonsnow
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2 hours ago, Finnn said:

This is... just so.. totally wrong...

 

Why?

You logged at 1 random time and checked /who or .. total number of online players as a whole... which could be partially alts prem or not... which is should not be called 'player count', cute random observation but the number is random and shows nothing than online numbers you tracked over a period at random times(even if it was done at specific hour every week on your end)

 

Wasn't it easier to check mrtg and dump things from there? You'll see peak hours with most players online, premium player count and least active hours of the day/week, which is probably something for devs to use when planning events 🤫

Feel free to provide a link to their data archive.  Anything longer than 5 years would be great!

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2 hours ago, jonsnow said:

Then the other issue is travel time is hard enough as is, on xan it's even worst.  Forget about meeting up with someone on the other side of the map.  If there was a way we could travel specifically to each others towns, without having to manually do it...  autopilot if there's a highway?  Maybe this is already a thing, but I find it so annoying having to try to navigate a wilderness that looks identical everywhere.

 

If anything travel is too easy these days... with the amount of teleportation options, wagoners, horse gear, hell horses, plotting course, the cheap cost of mailing... basically everything feels right next door. The most striking thing about Wurm to me was always the sense of scale and we've lost a lot of that. 

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Not sure if this is what you want, but here are some stats from Bdew:

 

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On 9/19/2019 at 4:26 PM, jonsnow said:

The problem is there's so much stuff to fix to make easier/better in order for it to affect whether new players stay.

 

For example, I recently came back and was doing cloth tailoring.  I have to convert, only small amounts at a time... into string.  Why can't I convert large amounts?  There's no device for this?  This is called gameplay, constantly hitting create over and over?  

That's where Wurm has always failed.  IT thinks gameplay is clicking a button over and over.  This is simply not the case.  There's just so much tedium, and not a lot of substance.

 

The other issue is there's no end-game.  Reach 100 in a skill after ten years?  Congrats, there's been nothing new to build for the last 40-60 points.  You can build a higher QL barrel.

To add on to that, the lack of information all over the place really retracts from the experience.  I gain 10 points in blacksmithy, but there's no tooltips telling me how my weapons have improved with 10ql, or how my tools have improved.  I made a rare, but I have no idea how it improved the item if at all.  This really makes the experience feel empty and progress feel slow.  

 

Then the other issue is travel time is hard enough as is, on xan it's even worst.  Forget about meeting up with someone on the other side of the map.  If there was a way we could travel specifically to each others towns, without having to manually do it...  autopilot if there's a highway?  Maybe this is already a thing, but I find it so annoying having to try to navigate a wilderness that looks identical everywhere.

 

The big one for me was that as skills got better, the daily grind didn't really improve.  You still had to weed your plants etc every day and it gets to a point where it just feels like a choir in a video game.  In games like Harvest Moon as you develop and move further into it you acquire new and improved versions of the same tool that make the day to day less tedious and give you incentive to continue.

 

Also, the lack of Animal variety for breeding and PURPOSE is a big issue.

 

Then there's the skill grind.  I feel like Jackals grind is PERFECT for Freedom, but for a temporary server it still seems too slow!  

The average person just doesn't have a ridiculous amount of time to grind and grind and grind...  Most of us have 3-4 hours a night, if that to play a video game.  To compete for our time, which is exactly what a business should be trying to do...  You have to make the game compelling, and that players can achieve something and feel progress in 3-4 hours a night.

 

You're basically asking for a completely different game.  I get it, wurm isn't for you, that's fine - you may well find that wu is more to your liking, I believe there are a few servers that seem to stick around, so maybe you'd be better off there?  But most of what you're moaning about is stuff I actually enjoy.  I LIKE that the end-game is up to me to create for myself.  Most of the information you want (what a rare does, etc) is available on the wiki. I don't need to see massive change in 3 hours to feel like I've made progress - jackl reminded me that even with no skills or kit, just getting yourself a proper carving knife can feel amazing! 

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5 hours ago, Wonka said:

 

You're basically asking for a completely different game.  I get it, wurm isn't for you, that's fine - you may well find that wu is more to your liking, I believe there are a few servers that seem to stick around, so maybe you'd be better off there?  But most of what you're moaning about is stuff I actually enjoy.  I LIKE that the end-game is up to me to create for myself.  Most of the information you want (what a rare does, etc) is available on the wiki. I don't need to see massive change in 3 hours to feel like I've made progress - jackl reminded me that even with no skills or kit, just getting yourself a proper carving knife can feel amazing! 

or maybe that help with the lack of retention...

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No one cares about retention, they care about making game the game that they've always known...  It's like a captain, and their ship.  They don't care if it's sinking as long as they're onboard.

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On 9/19/2019 at 5:36 AM, darthryan said:

I took the liberty of using the convolutional neural network from my thesis on this data, in conjunction with my own records and player count information on the website, to predict the number of players that will be online in the future. Here are the results: 

  Hide contents

87JS5sw.png

 

Ha ha. But in all seriousness, after the Steam announcement, I do wonder how these trends will go into the future. Looking forward to a part 2, or whatever.

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2 hours ago, MinorArchitect said:

Ha ha. But in all seriousness, after the Steam announcement, I do wonder how these trends will go into the future. Looking forward to a part 2, or whatever.

You can use this site to track of interested, no need to wait on updates from OP.

 

https://jenn001.game.wurmonline.com/mrtg/paying.html

 

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The devs have to decide is WO different from WU..?
The avg spend on a game was $1.5k. How am I going to get my $1.5k worth over $20..?

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1 hour ago, Seraph said:

The devs have to decide is WO different from WU..?
The avg spend on a game was $1.5k. How am I going to get my $1.5k worth over $20..?

Care to explain the 1500$ spending? Over which timeline should that happen?

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