Since you're still below 5k average players after patch 1.2?
... or is there an explanation that makes more sense?

I'm curious.

If you had read patch notes, the population is dust + tranquility...

So since 1.2 it's suddenly EVE + Dust?
What about Alpha, Beta, Open Beta and Launch?

Let me guess.
They claim it was a bug not displaying it right, right?
It all makes sense now.

Which begs the questions "How do we know how many people are playing DUST? Why combine the numbers?" cuz I don't remember asking to know how many people are logged in to EVE. Was there a bunch of "We wanna see total population of EVE together! *RAGE*!"

Since you're still below 5k average players after patch 1.2?
... or is there an explanation that makes more sense?

I'm curious.

http://eve-offline.net/?server=dust


go there. that tells you how many are playing dust.

they are probably showing dust numbers for the eve pop as well, cause the numbers i've been seeing looks like eve is dying too, they really should float CCP before all their games crash and burn.

It's not like games goes through phases where the population rises and falls.

It's not like people cannot play multiple games.

Come now, EVE will survive until Star Citizen launches at least.

called marketing
when console kiddies dload the game they will see 30K+ ppl playing and not think its both EVE and DUST and wonder WOW game must be amazing!

also meant to mask the actual player numbers from console kids who might see under 5K playing and say the game is "dead" and go play something else

Thanks for the good link.

Interesting to note that even though aggregate connected players is on a slow downtrend, the new player numbers are relatively constant at 600 a day, even though it doesn't mention whether those are just new characters associated to current accounts (ie. alts) or just new characters.

If you're into technical analysis, a 9 and 25 day moving average convergence/divergence (MACD) shows a downtrend for current connected players while new players MACD seems to show a leveling off to a flat state - which if you want to take bets, means that the current connected player base will decrease and flatline at about 3500 within 2 months, and stay steady after that unless the new characters joining increases to above 700, after which the average should hit about 4000-4500 players online. This should be relatively steady until December.

Of course, if something suddenly jolts the new player count to above 700 a day then my predictions will mean nothing! :)

Since you're still below 5k average players after patch 1.2?
... or is there an explanation that makes more sense?

I'm curious.

called marketing
when console kiddies dload the game they will see 30K+ ppl playing and not think its both EVE and DUST and wonder WOW game must be amazing!

also meant to mask the actual player numbers from console kids who might see under 5K playing and say the game is "dead" and go play something else

Except 30k+ isn't going to make console "kiddies" wonder "WOW game must be amazing!" instead they'll think "WOW game must be dieing!". 30k people playing reflects a mediocre shooter and yet even black ops 1 still has more people playing than this game has combined with another game.

lol, what a conspiracy, hiding numbers in plain sight. ohhhhhh

I don't think anybody thinks there are that many people on. The first time I saw it I knew it was counting Eve players. It happened before and they fixed it.

Hopefully they are working on things that matter.

Eve-offline.net is written by a 3rd party. So regardless of the existence of the website, CCP is trying to be deceptive.

That 3rd party tool uses an API call explicitly provided by CCP for this purpose.

"Deceptive" is probably a bit too strong: they are emphasising the number that best serves their purpose. My view is that CCP's current policy is to focus on the New Eden universe more and more, with less emphasis on individual games.