Is there a way to measure CO's current population?

theravenforce · September 2016

I ask because I've recently been seeing a few people saying that the population in Champions Online is very low, I just wondered if there was actually a tool to measure that and if so, what is it?

Also, what IS CO's current population level?

Thanks in advance!

nepht · September 2016

nextnametaken said:
This is what Population is at 4:50AM Saturday September 17, 2016

91 Level 40 players.
27 Level 29-39 players
99 Level 1-28 players

I know you like to know.

Majestic.

Unknown · September 2016

This content has been removed.

markhawkman · September 2016

I don't know of any accurate way for players to know that.

flyingfinn · September 2016

Today there was 34 players in Zone #1, 4 in #2, 3 in #3 and 1 in #4.
-.-

sterga · September 2016

I measure the population by how long it takes the daily alert to pop. I generally don't bother doing the daily after 10pm pacific time. Outside of events, doing the alert daily can be iffy even after 9pm now. You can also see the difference in costume contest participation.

The only public data is from steam charts. You can't see the full picture, but you can see trends.

nepht · September 2016

Sure fire way is to take picks of zone population at 4 in the morning then s***post on the forums claiming the game is dead.

*sorry dude ( you know who you are :P ) I love ya but I had to*

nbkxs · September 2016

I'd say @peak somewhere between 250, and 350? I assume you're looking for a simultaneous value? Rather than total that log on.

xoriandruid · September 2016

The population really isnt an issue the issue is people want to group up for different kinds of content and no one really is these days, I think allot of people will come back once the update hits we should see a huge population increase, just not sure when the update will come.

decorumfriends · September 2016

nepht said:
Sure fire way is to take picks of zone population at 4 in the morning then s***post on the forums claiming the game is dead.

*sorry dude ( you know who you are :P ) I love ya but I had too*

You beat me to it.

rebornmonster79 · September 2016

Older games had a search all feature for players. Maybe something like that could be added. Just tossing out an idea is all.

chaelk · September 2016

except for people running in anon, who won't show on any search.

roughbearmattach · September 2016

Knowing the server population at a given moment in a day isn't really "the server population".

The metric that would be more useful to know would be number of active accounts. Define active as "logged in during the past week".

Unknown · September 2016

This content has been removed.

pantagruel01 · September 2016

rebornmonster79#9330 said:
Older games had a search all feature for players. Maybe something like that could be added. Just tossing out an idea is all.

You can do that in CO, but search has a cap of 100 which I've yet to not reach.

jonsills · September 2016

flyingfinn wrote: »

Today there was 34 players in Zone #1, 4 in #2, 3 in #3 and 1 in #4.
-.-

In which Zone? MC? Desert (hah)? MI? One of the Alerts?

See, that's the problem - the CO world consists of a number of zones, including Hideouts, and people are constantly transitioning between them.

nextnametaken · September 2016

To find all players in all zones #1, you just type "#1" into the search.
Repeat as needed with #2, #3, #4, etc until you have zero players returned in the search.

Add your search results up and get the total.

If you hit the hundred player search return limit, you can search for levels n1-n2, (1-6, 7-10, etc) add the results and get the total.

These searches capture all players in all instances as you will see for yourself.
Steamcharts tracks Steam players playing the game, and its never very far from what you'll see in Millenium City.

I won't post the numbers anymore since there's no new people claiming the population is getting better or is fine, it's the same old faces for years, which tells you how the population is doing all on it's own.

themightyzenith · September 2016

That's only if you want to be able to get a number of how many are in the different instances in the Zone you are in at that moment. Doesn't count other areas of the game (including hideouts). And steamcharts only count those playing through steam. Many folks do not.

And the most important point is that it ONLY gives you numbers for that moment you are checking. I may be wrong, but I think the OP is looking for something along the lines of "How many people play CO these days?", rather than "How many folks are on at the moment?".

To get more or less the right answer would require a longer study being done over time and statistics taken at different times and different days....... or if Cryptic can tell us. Don't hold your breath for the last solution.

championshewolf · September 2016

Steamcharts says currently 205 from steam logged in. Since that's roughly a 3rd of the actively logged in you can estimate that currently there are around 615 people give or take online right now. The accurate number of people that still play you can't get since that number fluctuates as some log in and some log out.

nextnametaken · September 2016

themightyzenith said:
That's only if you want to be able to get a number of how many are in the different instances in the Zone you are in at that moment. Doesn't count other areas of the game (including hideouts).

100% wrong, it would take you ten seconds to prove this to yourself.

jennymachx · September 2016

There is no tool and there is no complete way to measure overall population, considering that everyone have different active play and disconnect periods.

Anyone claiming otherwise is doing nothing but speculation based on incomplete anecdotal data.

themightyzenith · September 2016

nextnametaken said:

themightyzenith said:
That's only if you want to be able to get a number of how many are in the different instances in the Zone you are in at that moment. Doesn't count other areas of the game (including hideouts).
100% wrong, it would take you ten seconds to prove this to yourself.

Congratulations, you have proved me wrong on this point. I'll take it that by not commenting on or quoting my other points that they are right?

jennymachx said:
There is no tool and there is no complete way to measure overall population, considering that everyone have different active play and disconnect periods.

Anyone claiming otherwise is doing nothing but speculation based on incomplete anecdotal data.

Pretty much, yeah.

nextnametaken · September 2016

nextnametaken said:
To find all players in all zones #1, you just type "#1" into the search.
Repeat as needed with #2, #3, #4, etc until you have zero players returned in the search.

Add your search results up and get the total.

If you hit the hundred player search return limit, you can search for levels n1-n2, (1-6, 7-10, etc) add the results and get the total.

These searches capture all players in all instances as you will see for yourself.
Steamcharts tracks Steam players playing the game, and its never very far from what you'll see in Millenium City.

nepht · September 2016

Look guys. Don't do game population threads. Nextname will come into your houses eat all your pop tarts and put his feet up on all your tables.

xoriandruid · September 2016

Honestly im confused by this lft system everyone I ever ask saids they are not lft but it saids they are? They need to add an auto lft system so when you sign up for lft you will auto team for whatever it is you wanted to do.

jennymachx · September 2016

There's a difference between population activity trends and the ACTUAL population numbers. Eyeballing zone numbers and Steamcharts do not equal the latter.

chaelk · September 2016

You CANNOT however search anyone who is ANON and there seem to be quite a few currently going on alert lists when I get in.

jonsills · September 2016

Yeah, Next has been working for years now to make us all believe the population is steadily dropping and the game will die at any moment. According to his trends, the in-game population should have gone into negative numbers sometime last year.

jennymachx · September 2016

Well according to Next logic the grand total active population of CO has been maintained at what, a constant 200-300 for the past how many years now?

200-300 total active players with a portion of them free players and for some reason the game remains profitable enough to keep it up running for that long and to justify developing new content periodically. Seems legit.

darqaura2 · September 2016

jennymachx said:
Well according to Next logic the grand total active population of CO has been maintained at what, a constant 200-300 for the past how many years now?

200-300 total active players with a portion of them free players and for some reason the game remains profitable enough to keep it up running for that long and to justify developing new content periodically. Seems legit.

lol

pwestolemyname · September 2016

Nobody mentioned that when you switch maps in a particular zone, you can see how many people are in the other maps. Then just do the search for the map you are in and you can get a rough estimate of how many are in that zone at that moment. Pop zone to zone and do that and you'll get a rough idea. Yes, it doesn't count those who are in Hideouts or Anon, so add on a percentage of that.

If you really wanted to work at it, do a search, note all the @screennames, then do that again and again and again throughout the different zones at different times on different days for a month and you could get a decent count of active accounts. But, really, if you have that kind of free time, get a girlfriend for pete's sake.

decorumfriends · September 2016

If you really wanted to work at it and do all that, you still have meaningless statistics that do not reflect total population in any way.

Frankly, people need to stop worrying about it. Us knowing exactly what the population is will affect things not one iota. Just freaking play the game.

nextnametaken · September 2016

jennymachx said:
Well according to Next logic the grand total active population of CO has been maintained at what, a constant 200-300 for the past how many years now?

Where did I ever say that? I know generally how many people are available at any given time.

Right now, at 10:20AM Server Time
There are 94 players between level 1-20
There are 97 players between level 21-39
There are more than 100 players at level 40.

While Steam is reporting an increase of 55 players over what the population was three hours ago when something crashed.

I met a returning player a week or so ago, the second thing she said to me after informing me that she was a returning player was "this game seems kind of dead compared to when I used to play it." Still she was willing to grind horrible sidekick deaths in Vibora Bay with me for a waist cape that never dropped and I haven't seen her since I left her for my dinner. Why do you suppose a returning player says the game feels dead?: Because you people are so friendly and available and there's half a handful more like you to support people's online co-op gaming needs?

magpieuk2014 · September 2016

It's usually (at least, when I play, which is 1100 - 1600 PST) pretty quiet in terms of game population.

But it's active enought, we rarely have trouble getting Alerts to pop, Rampage queues, etc don't seem a problem either. Millennium City feels quieter because there's usually 50-75 players in Canada or MI doing Cosmics who would have been standing around Ren Cen... but that's no big deal, at least they're playing.

Not as many in Westside as I remember, though - there always used to be three or four new toons down there. Not so many now, but hopefully that might improve.

themightyzenith · September 2016

nextnametaken said:
meaningless numbers and hearsay, as usual

championshewolf · September 2016

Going by averages and how players generally work, if you use other MMO server to subscription ratios as a baseline, you can wager that on a given day that those logged in represent anywhere from 7% to 10% of the active number of people playing the game, since people log in and out constantly. So on a guess the active player count of Champions is probably anywhere from 7,000 to 15,000

jennymachx · September 2016

nextnametaken said:
I met a returning player a week or so ago, the second thing she said to me after informing me that she was a returning player was "this game seems kind of dead compared to when I used to play it." Still she was willing to grind horrible sidekick deaths in Vibora Bay with me for a waist cape that never dropped and I haven't seen her since I left her for my dinner. Why do you suppose a returning player says the game feels dead?: Because you people are so friendly and available and there's half a handful more like you to support people's online co-op gaming needs?

Yeah, cool story bro. A single returning player mentions that they didn't get a satisfying gaming experience upon coming back before disappearing, and that somehow is applicable to every other returning players' experiences. Yup, that must be it. Every returning player has been outright quitting and it's also because the community is so non-supportive and unfriendly towards returning players in general. Also just because the player says the game feels "dead" to them, it means the game must be dead. Because sweeping, dismissive generalizations are always true, right?

You know what this is called? Confirmation bias. You have a preexisting belief in your personal head-space that the state of the game is so terrible as you want to believe it to be that anything with the slightest indication at just face-value you come across equals to absolute proof of what you believe to be true, without bothering to put any critical thinking into anything else relevant to have a more objective view on things.

You deliberately refuse to consider other factors important in attributing to what the overall in-game population is actually like. You willingly ignore things like how the game is played globally with players coming from different time-zones and having different active and inactive gaming periods. You willingly ignore differences between players quitting the game indefinitely and players taking a temporary hiatus from the game to pursue other games or whatnot and but still have a vested interest to return playing again at a later time. You willingly ignore the fact that not everyone plays through the Steam platform considering that the game can be played through Arc or standalone. You willingly ignore hidden statuses. You willingly ignore the fact that the game, having been up for the number of years that have passed while still having a decent amount of development put into it, remains to be profitable on some level to justify exactly that.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that last bit contributes to your stubborn obsession with population numbers and how adamant you want to be right about them being as terrible as you want them to be, because the current situation with the game is pretty much opposite of what you believe to be true.

Hey, if it makes you feel better and gives you a personal sense of closure, if the game does shut down in the very near future, then feel free to gloat about how "right" you are, even with every passing active year by now. Geeze.

roughbearmattach · September 2016

championshewolf said:
Going by averages and how players generally work, if you use other MMO server to subscription ratios as a baseline, you can wager that on a given day that those logged in represent anywhere from 7% to 10% of the active number of people playing the game, since people log in and out constantly. So on a guess the active player count of Champions is probably anywhere from 7,000 to 15,000

This is a better estimate than using a single snapshot of server population, and then proclaiming the CO population is only 400 people.

Like Shewolf is saying, and I said, above, "CO population" is really the number of active accounts, however you define active account.

markhawkman · September 2016

I think I would define "active account" as anyone who has logged in in the past week.

roughbearmattach · September 2016

markhawkman said:
I think I would define "active account" as anyone who has logged in in the past week.

As would I, but so many people who talk about this topic, or create posts about this topic, come back to snapshots of server population at a given moment, which is related to server population, but only in a general way.

pwestolemyname · September 2016

I mean, during normal hours when people are generally awake and not at work, it is fairly easy to gather 30-45 people to hunt a Cosmic (which many people claim to dislike), so I dunno, seems like a reasonably decent population to me. As was said, what's the point of knowing the population? As long as you can get stuff going, it's all good. Alerts pop, Rampages pop, people show up to mangle Mega-D. What else is needed? If you can't find someone to ERP with, it's you.

decorumfriends · September 2016

"But without this statistical analysis, how will everyone know I'm right that the game sucks and is dying???"

There's really no other reason to care.

spinnytop · September 2016

roughbearmattach said:
Knowing the server population at a given moment in a day isn't really "the server population".

The metric that would be more useful to know would be number of active accounts. Define active as "logged in during the past week".

^

nextnametaken · September 2016

This is what the population is at 4:50AM Saturday September 17, 2016

91 Level 40 players.
27 Level 29-39 players
99 Level 1-28 players

I know you like to know.

Nobody won anything for 20 minutes fight at 5AM Mega Destroid with only one zone fighting.

jennymachx · September 2016

jonsills · September 2016

What? You mean that when someone is awake at 5am Pacific Time on a Saturday, playing MMOs is not a top priority??

themightyzenith · September 2016

I looked out my front window this morning at 5am and saw nobody in the street. Has the rapture come to London and I was the only one that was left behind?

theravenforce · September 2016

Oh wow...I'm a bit shocked at the amount of responses to this thread...

But what I've managed to understand is that:

1) No one has a definitive or official way of determining CO's population aside from good estimates.

2) CO's population is likely in a spot which allows it to continue to run/pay for itself.

3) Cat gifs are universally applicable to threads of any kind

Thanks all!

spinnytop · September 2016

themightyzenith said:
I looked out my front window this morning at 5am and saw nobody in the street. Has the rapture come to London and I was the only one that was left behind?

Yes, as you can see by this picture I took we can see that the only living creatures left are gangs of adorable puppies.

Well and obviously the two of us... global human population confirmed for 2.

themightyzenith · September 2016

spinnytop said:

themightyzenith said:
I looked out my front window this morning at 5am and saw nobody in the street. Has the rapture come to London and I was the only one that was left behind?
Yes, as you can see by this picture I took we can see that the only living creatures left are gangs of adorable puppies.

Well and obviously the two of us... global human population confirmed for 2.

One. I have no proof you are actually human.

xoriandruid · September 2016

themightyzenith said:
I looked out my front window this morning at 5am and saw nobody in the street. Has the rapture come to London and I was the only one that was left behind?

You guys do realize there are different time zones right?

Is there a way to measure CO's current population?

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