announcements

There's a new link on the online page - the online history page. It shows historical stats for how many bots were online at once and online over the past 1, 7, and 30 days over time. Data goes back to February 2011, but with some caveats; see the info on that page for full details.

My goal of publicly providing this data is twofold:

1. Measure the success of new player engagement efforts - As I talked about a couple weeks ago, lately I've had my eye towards improving the new player experience in order to do a better job at attracting and retaining new players. Number of online bots is by no means a perfect measure of activity or engagement, but it's not terrible and is more powerful (I think) than what I can do with Google Analytics out of the box.


2. Give more visibility into game health - It's no secret that game activity has waned over the years since launch in 2011. Some decline after the initial excitement of the game launch was expected, but there's a steady downward trend over the years. The charts provide a somewhat depressing though honest picture - while there is definitely a downward trend, there's not no activity. It's with the existing/remaining core contingent of active players logging on every day (thank you!) that I hope to grow the game back into what it was before, and more.

Enjoy! I hope you find this interesting.

What the online count shows.

What the few people left on the game are like now.

I mean, sure it's an update, but it's just statistics. I'm not going to get super excited over it. And before you say I'm negative or something, it's just a visual representation of the matter at hand. I really don't know how we can raise this ship back up.

Zal, as a former bots2 player, you of all people should know that "useless" stats are a staple of this game. :)

And yes, the charts certainly don't look the way I'd like them to look. Now that there is a clearly measureable goal though, my objective is to reverse the downward trend. Can't measure success without a success metric.

I was thinking on this... can you show the different IPs that login in certain time period?

Then we could see how much different people or even new players are playing the game in one month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year... or this isnt feasible?

If I understand correctly, you're saying number of unique IPs in the past N days instead of number of unique bots in the past N days? That's technically feasible. I guess the spirit is to get a more accurate count of unique "people"? It would still be an imperfect measure, so I'm not sure it's worth the effort - number of unique bots is a fairly reasonable (and good enough for my purposes) measure of game activity IMO.

The aim would be to have an idea of unique people but also new players. A new player would be considered an IP that never connected to bots4. Or do the IPs change often?

I think it's more or less redundant, at least for Enders purposes. Even with multiple bots from one person being accounted for, it's still a constant. The trend should still be accurate given enough of a sample size (ex. time).

It depends on the connection type. Some have new IPs every few minutes (mobile connections especially). Some have a new IP every time they login. Others change every week or so. Some less frequently than that. It's not a great (or even good) measure of "people" unfortunately. Fortunately, simply counting number of online bots is a good enough proxy for game activity for me. :)

I mean, sure it's an update, but it's just statistics.

Just statistics? Blasphemy!

This page is insanely slow on mobile when you are the one to load it first.

The cache miss should only result in a performance hit for the server. I could imagine the clientside rendering being pretty sluggish for phones though. There's a lot of data points being pumped into the charting library. I could probably optimize this some, but it's kind of a pain to deal with and doesn't have much benefit for the game, so I probably won't get to it for awhile.