player count decrease

I recall another thread mentioning that the way players are counted changed in February, thus the change in player numbers.

Explanation? Go outside man... Its getting warmer (finally at least Lithuania) as you see mostly waiting players dropped that means there is less spectators who would just hang here. And actual playing players didint dropped that much.

But yeah bugs and hard switch to buggy release does things too.

It was February and march that we went through the 93.x farce. It would be interesting if players increased even slightly now that we are using a working engine.

I dont play much often too... I don't know what's wrong. Maybe its the weather.

It's the change in the way things are measured, I believe autohosts were excluded, which would account for many 'waiting' players, thus the sharp drop there. AFAIR at least. The more interesting statistical changes are the peak before the new year (to be expected), and the dips at the start of june and mid july.

thats a really sad statement, licho...

quote: A change to the way that they are counted would be a sharp drop. This drop is smooth.

The grahphs does not show it as sharp drop because averaging, smoothing etc.
For example look at this:

Obviously xta never has had 0.5 players ingame, it just displays as that.

i have to admit i have been playing significantly less since jan/feb, mainly due to engine and fps dros finaly catching up with me... i cant even play in team games anymore due to lag out.

meh...

I have personally (mostly) quit playing for a few reasons:

Huge discrepancy of player skill in team games. 1300 Elo players shouldn't be in the same game with 2300 Elo players. Makes the game wildly variable, even when numerically balanced.

Experienced Players room would fix my first point, but no one ever uses it.

Overall teamkilling problem. By this I mean: the game provides many ways to kill your team. We can ban those who TK, but then that brings up Licho's point: he thinks we are too aggressive with banning. I think he's wrong, but our overall ban/not ban policy is a bit murky and people lash out one way or another. I think if teamkilling mechanisms were removed, the problem would go away. Unfortunately, this is a very low-level design problem that would require massive changes to balance and game structure.

Skill growth stagnation. I have reached the point where I'm not getting any better at ZK. I like continuously improving whatever I'm doing, and I feel like I'm playing at my maximum potential skill in ZK. I wish I was better, but it seems like I have hit my ceiling.

UI problems. Seriously, the default UI is among the worst I've ever seen in a game. I spent a lot of time customizing my UI and every engine update seems to break my changes. As we all know, it's an amazing CPU hog and decreases everyone's frame rates.

AI problems. This is mostly driven by ZK's incredibly variable reload times. No other RTS has units with these massive reload times because it's wayyyyyy too easy to trick AI with it and render super expensive units absolutely useless. We've all seen the attempts at writing a no-overkill AA system but it's simply trying to patch the problem, not fixing the root cause. For example, an Annihilator can be tricked to shoot a 20m flea. A gnat can be used to trick the hacksaw. If they fired more rapidly, the problem would be reduced. I don't like games where it's more about tricking AI than out-playing your enemies.

Dirtbags. Enough said.

If this is going to turn into a thread about improving ZK then I really think it would be worth limiting game sizes to 12 players or something. People have been complaining about it for long enough, it must be worth testing if it works.