Server Population

sandukutupu · November 2016

I did a game census;

Protector's Enclave : 760
1. Blacklake District : 48
2. Tower District : 110
3. Blackdagger Ruins : 58
4. Neverdeath Graveyard : 80
5. Helm's Hold : 40
6. Ebon Downs : 41
7. Vellosk : 20
8. Pirates' Skyhold : 34
9. Icespire Peak : 61
10. The Chasm : 37
11. Rothé Valley : 33
12. Mount Hotenow : 22
13. Whispering Caverns : 22
14. Sharandar : 102
15. Dread Ring : 103
16. Caer Konig : 30
17. Well of Dragons : 143
18. Drowned Shore : 90
19. Reclamation Rock : 48
20. Fiery Pit : 50
21. Spinward Rise : 63
22. Mantol-Derith : 50
23. Bryn Shander : 122

*Total Population : 2167

This was done between 11 AM and Noon EST November 9th, 2016

I am not a Steam user but Steam Charts reports 2200 to 2400 online. Are they on the same server as regular PC users? Meanwhile PSN is reporting a grand total of 42,030 game owners. It doesn't say how many of them are online today. If anyone reading this knows of other sources to track server population, please inform us.

*Note: Due to the wait time between zone jumping, other players may have been counted more than once or not at all. This number doesn't represent players in dungeons.

micky1p00 · November 2016

Aren't you missing the SHs and the new map ? A day after release, everyone is fishing there....
And Icewind pass, dwarven valley, Lonely wood, Cold run, and every instanced content like AR, BT, and so on...

beckylunatic · November 2016

It also does not include players in strongholds, skirmishes, PvP maps, trials, any quest instances at all, or the Sea of Moving Ice (or Cold Run or Lonelywood, for that matter). You can "find person" and enter a location in the text field to check dungeons and other instanced content, but it'll likely return more results than can be parsed to check stronghold instances.

Yes, Steam Charts represents PC players who use Steam to launch the game.

plasticbat · November 2016

How about dungeons and mini-dungeons? edemo, POM, tiamat, Cold Run, Loneywood, DV, Icewindpass, etc.

okeephe · November 2016

None of these count all of us who do not use ARC or Steam to log in, but I think steam seems fairly accurate. It is only an assumption that steam is only counting those logged in through it's interface.

sandukutupu · November 2016

@okeephe I don't use ARC or Steam to login either. I am using the non-ARC launcher. I haven't changed since the game was in alpha. So if you were online between 11 and noon, I probably counted you.

@plasticbat and @micky1p00 I stated above the numbers don't include dungeons and in my opinion, strongholds are dungeons.

@beckylunatic I am not asking if the Steam numbers include Steam member but are they counting the non-steam? Let's assume for a moment that only 50% are steam players, shouldn't my population be closer to 4,800? Someone told me about 20% play on Steam, ok then I should have seen close to 10K players.

Also I seem to recall they bragged about 2 million PSN. Why is PSN reporting on 42K game owners? I am confused or some one is pumping up those numbers. Was the 2 million a goal to be set or just the number of people who own a PS4? Frankly I am impressed by the 42K compared to the 2,000 to 3,000 who play daily on Steam. However I doubt all 42K PSN players are playing at once.

micky1p00 · November 2016

sandukutupu said:
@okeephe I don't use ARC or Steam to login either. I am using the non-ARC launcher. I haven't changed since the game was in alpha. So if you were online between 11 and noon, I probably counted you.

@plasticbat and @micky1p00 I stated above the numbers don't include dungeons and in my opinion, strongholds are dungeons.

@beckylunatic I am not asking if the Steam numbers include Steam member but are they counting the non-steam? Let's assume for a moment that only 50% are steam players, shouldn't my population be closer to 4,800? Someone told me about 20% play on Steam, ok then I should have seen close to 10K players.

Also I seem to recall they bragged about 2 million PSN. Why is PSN reporting on 42K game owners? I am confused or some one is pumping up those numbers. Was the 2 million a goal to be set or just the number of people who own a PS4? Frankly I am impressed by the 42K compared to the 2,000 to 3,000 who play daily on Steam. However I doubt all 42K PSN players are playing at once.

How SH is a dungeon ? max 40 people per instance is not a dungeon. It's a larger zone than WoD with 35 max iirc.
And you didn't count all the new zones where most of the not-new, and not-bot population is now. So what the point of all of it if you skip so many people?

sandukutupu said:
I am not asking if the Steam numbers include Steam member but are they counting the non-steam? Let's assume for a moment that only 50% are steam players, shouldn't my population be closer to 4,800? Someone told me about 20% play on Steam, ok then I should have seen close to 10K players.

Steam numbers can't include non-steam numbers.

Probably not counting all the non-satic zones and all the new stuff and SHs has something to do with missing so many players.
All the places that veteran players are actually doing something in, were not counted.

There are about 1200 people in Sea of Moving Ice alone right now.

karakla1 · November 2016

Steamcharts records only Steam. The game has Arc and Arc also offers quest for additional Zen so you can expect to find also players there.
According to steam spy there where over 55,000 Steam Accounts (individual) logged in within two weeks. It is also to note that seem not to include players that install the game with steam and then use the extern neverwinter launcher, only Neverwinter Users that started the game from steam directly (from the library tab).

If i remember correctly old Auctionhous data showed that there are over 20,000 individual @handles that post at least one offer within one week.

Often the question comes up: Is that a healthy playerbase? Yes. Only if we know a small portion of the whole picture it is a healthy playerbase. If we consider the 55,000 logged in Player within two weeks as a baseline it is also considerably good in comparison to other MMORPGs like Eve Online which has on its "low times" only about 20,000 active players.

Also Neverwinter is constructed to run with a considerably small community (small instanced areas with 10-30 players at a time, 5 player content, 10 player content and at max 25 player content).

That also probably accounts for XBox and PS4.

sandukutupu · November 2016

*heavy sigh*

Instead of trying to "prove" statistical math wrong, I asked, "If anyone reading this knows of other sources to track server population, please inform us." Why is it, I have a bunch of people trying to second guess the data I presented. I explained all this and instead of someone posting results of counts in areas I didn't list, I get told over and over that the game data is somehow flawed. The total population of these areas is posted and summed.

If you feel my survey is incorrect, please present the data and post the methods you used to make a proper census of this game. Thank you.

eldarth · November 2016

You gathered the data "in-game" so it doesn't matter at all if they launched using steam/ARC or anything else -- your stats came from the ONLY US server irregardless.

throsbi · November 2016

The only true way of knowing the actual numbers is if you have access to the game server(s). Even you have have a supercomputer and dash thru each zone to get the info it has already changed in the other zones.

Not sure what the point of all this is but it was interesting to read

valcontar73 · November 2016

Don't discuss about that, it's pointless, if we don't have acces to their database it's impossible to know how many players log in.

And any of you, know how many "bots" log in the game either.

So it's totally possible to log 100 players and 1.000 bots, and ANY of you'll know it, because any of you have the real data, so don't try to have the "truth" meanwhile you can't acces their database.

Neither of you can say that there is a lot of players and a healthy population or the opposite, because you don't have any idea of how many bots operate in the game, neither the total "real gamers".

So we can only "guess".

And my guess is that there's a low population, and of that population, there are a few, only a few, that supoprt the game via VIP, Zen or the item shop. But it's only a guess.

kvet · November 2016

Even if the initial limited survey data was a third of the actual due to SH, instances and SoIM - it's still a fairly low population.

We'll never know the truth of it - Cryptic isn't willing to be truthful about it, which is why they only release clearly biased and inflated numbers like they did in that marketing tripe infographic.

micky1p00 · November 2016

sandukutupu said:
*heavy sigh*

Instead of trying to "prove" statistical math wrong, I asked, "If anyone reading this knows of other sources to track server population, please inform us." Why is it, I have a bunch of people trying to second guess the data I presented. I explained all this and instead of someone posting results of counts in areas I didn't list, I get told over and over that the game data is somehow flawed. The total population of these areas is posted and summed.

If you feel my survey is incorrect, please present the data and post the methods you used to make a proper census of this game. Thank you.

The whole problem is that this is not statistics, nor anything, about the whole population, statistics (in a case like this) uses a sample and tries to say something about the whole, but in this case, this is not a valid sample (for the whole population).
It indeed can say about the ratio of people among those instances at the time of the count.

If you don't want to count the most important zones like SH and the new zone at the day (or 1 after) it's released, then do not post "server population", It's not server population and has nothing to do with server population. If you want to make an attempt to count it Becky wrote a method, though it's problematic and takes a lot of work if you get more than 100 results per instance name. You will have to test each instance number and count it separately.

You can "heavy sigh" to the end of the world, but now we will have a debate if it's low or high or vs steam and etc... and all of it has nothing to do with reality. In a week, month, who knows how much from now we will have, like usual, posts referencing "someone who counted the whole server and it was only 2k people". Just because Wendy tried to do something interesting, made a mistake, but can't take criticism nor willing to admit it's not correct / nor somewhat correct it.

Also, steam is not a source of server population. It doesn't track server population, it tracks players who entered into Neverwinter using steam. Regardless of the servers or if I'm in a zone at all. Afaik, Russian main menu will count the same.

valcontar73 · November 2016

In my opinion it's a good representation, maybe not real, but an approach.

To be honest, @micky1p00 how many players are in the different SH? 1.000? 800? 500? 10?

How many in the dungeons? 1.000? 800? 500? 10?

How many in PvP? 10?

And how many are "bots"?

And how many support the game via VIP, Store, Zen?

Add a 0 to this 2K counted players in most of the zones, and maybe I'll admint there's a healthy population.

Oh! wait! How many in the Foundryyyyyyy? All of them!!! Yeah!! Oh! wait! The Foundry is unavailabe!!

micky1p00 · November 2016

valcontar73 said:
In my opinion it's a good representation, maybe not real, but an approach.

To be honest, @micky1p00 how many players are in the different SH? 1.000? 800? 500? 10?
How many in the dungeons? 1.000? 800? 500? 10?
How many in PvP? 10?
And how many are "bots"?
And how many support the game via VIP, Store, Zen?
Add a 0 to this 2K counted players in most of the zones, and maybe I'll admint there's a healthy population.
Oh! wait! How many in the Foundryyyyyyy? All of them!!! Yeah!! Oh! wait! The Foundry is unavailabe!!

I don't know what a healthy population is. What the peak times. What the low times.
But I do know what server population is not.
Moving Ice itself had ~1.2k people at the time I've posted. And I'm sure it was more closer to lunch date at the time the OP counted. So most of the zones says little about the most populated zones or the total population in general.

The question was not if it's healthy or not, but only a statement of game census, and a quick check shows a 50% mistake. Moving Ice sea is not a dungeon in any form. And if we assume all the rest at about ~500 people we almost get a 100% mistake. That's an ouch.

About game health, you can't know anything from this without cryptic numbers, you can't know if it's the same people sitting online, or there is a high turnover, if you get an average 3k-4k people online with an average play time of 1 hour, in 24 hours you just got ~80k people, 2 hours average and it's 40k people playing, can't know. And you will agree that 80k, 40k and so on it's a totally different story than 2k in terms of health..... And buying power.

Look at my first post, all I've pointed that is missing a lot of people, the OP just could have added them and be done with that.... Or if I guess correctly, doesn't have those zones unlocked, could have just relist, and ask from us to count the missing zones. Instead of arguing that SH is a dungeon and totally ignoring the single most populated zone in the game (fishing paradise) .... so here we are debating validity...

valcontar73 · November 2016

micky1p00 said:
About game health, you can't know anything from this without cryptic numbers

That's right, but we know you need more than 1 hour to do something profitable in the game, and you are saying 40k people in a span of 24h, Wendy counted in a span of 1-2 hours. Is not the same.

And again, how many are bots and how many are real players? And again, how many support the game?

And how many use several accounts? Several accounts to play or to use bots?

"As I said, don't discuss about that, it's pointless, if we don't have acces to their database it's impossible to know how many players log in."

But the numbers are still thin in my opinon. OK, we can guess 40k, but including players with several accounts, bots...

sandukutupu · November 2016

This really depresses me, I come here to discuss information and the lack of information. Look at this, all you want to do is fight and squabble with one another, and say that you're right and everyone else is wrong. This is not a debate. Many of you already got extremely defensive and some offensive about me just asking for more data. I guess I am wasting my time here, I will do my research elsewhere. There are already too few people that concern themselves with doing unbiased research.

What I am told, I care too much about this community, supporting the wiki, and supporting this game. @kreatyve you can draw this little drama to a close before I say something I will regret again. Thanks for your support.

micky1p00 · November 2016

sandukutupu said:
This really depresses me, I come here to discuss information and the lack of information. Look at this, all you want to do is fight and squabble with one another, and say that you're right and everyone else is wrong. This is not a debate. Many of you already got extremely defensive and some offensive about me just asking for more data. I guess I am wasting my time here, I will do my research elsewhere. There are already too few people that concern themselves with doing unbiased research.

What I am told, I care too much about this community, supporting the wiki, and supporting this game. @kreatyve you can draw this little drama to a close before I say something I will regret again. Thanks for your support.

1. We don't squabble nor fight, we actually agree that we can't say anything about health. The only person is getting defensive is you.

2. What you did is not research.

3. Also this is not unbiased research because you have a 100% mistake margin or at least 50%. This is exactly the opposite of it. And the whole point of the problem. While saying "Looking thin" (at the Facebook post).

4. BTW about the wiki, you mean that place where people never give appropriate credit when they add stuff ? And the main reason people who actually test or find things, don't want anything to do with it.

5. if someone disagrees with you, closing your ears (or the thread) and call it drama..... I guess you should do it only where people always agree with you, Like a totalitarian regime. Or you expect a debate to consist of only people who agree with you. That is called a mob, not a discussion.

6. Where someone said anything offensive about you? Or pointing that your data is incomplete and misleading is offensive ?

And the worse part, is that you not willing to fix nor do anything about that incomplete part or even acknowledge it, and yet you go and complain to your Facebook group.... that other irritate you... the most mature approach I ever saw to "research". What is the point of the whole post and counting people for an hour ?

sm0ld3r · November 2016

micky1p00 said:

sandukutupu said:
This really depresses me, I come here to discuss information and the lack of information. Look at this, all you want to do is fight and squabble with one another, and say that you're right and everyone else is wrong. This is not a debate. Many of you already got extremely defensive and some offensive about me just asking for more data. I guess I am wasting my time here, I will do my research elsewhere. There are already too few people that concern themselves with doing unbiased research.

What I am told, I care too much about this community, supporting the wiki, and supporting this game. @kreatyve you can draw this little drama to a close before I say something I will regret again. Thanks for your support.
1. We don't squabble nor fight, we actually agree that we can't say anything about health. The only person is getting defensive is you.

2. What you did is not research.

3. Also this is not unbiased research because you have a 100% mistake margin or at least 50%. This is exactly the opposite of it. And the whole point of the problem. While saying "Looking thin" (at the Facebook post).

4. BTW about the wiki, you mean that place where people never give appropriate credit when they add stuff ? And the main reason people who actually test or find things, don't want anything to do with it.

5. if someone disagrees with you, closing your ears (or the thread) and call it drama..... I guess you should do it only where people always agree with you, Like a totalitarian regime. Or you expect a debate to consist of only people who agree with you. That is called a mob, not a discussion.

6. Where someone said anything offensive about you? Or pointing that your data is incomplete and misleading is offensive ?

And the worse part, is that you not willing to fix nor do anything about that incomplete part or even acknowledge it, and yet you go and complain to your Facebook group.... that other irritate you... the most mature approach I ever saw to "research". What is the point of the whole post and counting people for an hour ?

I disagree with your assessment.

Even if it's off, it shows just how low the population really is. Everyone laughs at the steam charts, but based on her approach, it would seem the steam trend is extremely accurate.

All I can say is that even the rank 20 guilds are having motivation issues with the game now.

I think I would rather shoot myself than subject myself to what they consider new content. It's boring as hell and very unrewarding.

Despite all the complaints about empowerment and fishing, they STILL went ahead with it. Words can't describe their level of incompetence.

micky1p00 · November 2016

sm0ld3r said:

I disagree with your assessment.

Even if it's off, it shows just how low the population really is. Everyone laughs at the steam charts, but based on her approach, it would seem the steam trend is extremely accurate.

All I can say is that even the rank 20 guilds are having motivation issues with the game now.

Can't disagree about the motivation. A lot of people are either on a break or not happy about the grind of a grind. Thought some find aspects if the fishing not bad - in terms of mechanics and not reward towards weapons.

If the steam charts accurate? They obviously have correlation. They show a subset of people and we can learn about trends there. The problem is to know how close it is to the actual total.
And even if we know the total at any time, can we learn the total playing population from this ?

Like in the example earlier, same 2k-4k people counted and online at single time can be part 80k active players, or can be 20k players. We don't have a clue. And we have no way to know.

There are probably better ways to gouge health, AH (can't do that anymore), ZAX - the backlog is good to know the zen turnover and with that we can estimate the game income.

Gathering the total server population is also interesting and informative, even with all it's inheritant problems, but it's problematic when you wave off so many players (at least half) and try to make conclusions.
To make it really informative, it probably should be done few times, and as complete as possible. Then if you have the ratio to steam charts we can infer some info over time. Still not total population, but interesting non the less.

I have no clue why the OP is going all drama and defensive instead of just listing the missing zones and instances and try to complete those.
Considering that just checking with the social menu is considerably faster for the small zones (everything with less than 100 players) and can be done for dungeons. Or just even add what other people counted.....
It's a bummer to invest time and effort, and miss, but not the end of the world. Even for a rough estimation need to recheck the major zones at the same time or new time, but can't ignore a zone more populated than PE.

sockmunkey · November 2016

What is the point of even asking the question? What value does it have to us players to know the games population? We can already infer trends without hard numbers. So what do we really gain by this info? Its not like we can do anything about it. Or that somehow we need to know the population because Cryptic is unaware of it. Its useless info, in my opinion. As long as I can find goods I want to buy for sale in the AH, willing people to buy my goods, and an active queue for content. Then the population is fine.

vcek · November 2016

can't a dev or an admin tell us how many players are online currently ? c'mon at least post it from a regular user account so it wont be official

zebular · November 2016

To everyone reading, only one person plays this game: you. The rest are all figments of your imagination.

Closing this up now, per request.

Server Population

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