Nah. My drink of choice is Ginger Ale. Think of it this way. Between development, quality control, paying employees and colocated server/bandwidth fees, It costs a lot of money to keep an online game running. If there were only 5k players, even if they all bought gems like they were crack, operations would have shut down long ago. I doubt 5k players could even pay the bill for Chris's Aston Martin tuneup
OK, were starting with ~500k, let's even give a generous tiebreaker of 100k parked at PR1, up to 600k. I never suggested 95% were inactive. There do appear to be a number of bases with resources only in Collectors/mines, they may have logged in within two weeks, but for all purposes aren't really that active. Where do we go UP to way more than 500k active? I interpret Lynsey's response to be that many players who are NOT on the leaderboards are considered active (i.e. Counting numbers of people not on the leaderboard, who have not logged in within 2 weeks, but are still considered active by Midoki and hopefully will return to play and generate revenue). I think Tex and I are talking math based on leaderboard numbers, and you and Lynsey are discussing semantics of who is considered active (therefore different numbers)???
Or there's a helluva a lot of actives tied with Tex at PR1. C'mon and get me all you PH9s at my mighty ~PR400 ranking. I've got LOADS of gold!
Well if the tiebreaker is based on recent activity then a generous value may well be in the millions for all those that may login once every day or two. If the tie breaker is based on creation date-most recent then all other accounts created earlier would show up as lower rank, again hiding millions if Tex's second account was created recently. If the tie breaker was based on the quality of the player then there could be billions loosing out to Tex.
If someone has been offline for two weeks, they're removed from the board and classed as inactive, both in terms of the leaderboard and in terms of user numbers. The active user numbers I'm referencing are based on the weekly numbers (ie players that log into the game and interact at least once per week).
I've missing something here. If there are "well, well above 500k active users", what does the 488,586 represent in Tex's screenshot? I've thought until now that it was the number of active players (i.e. on the board) minus 1. If Tex was at position 488,586, surely there's 488,585 above him ?? Like I've said, maybe I'm missing something really obvious.
I'm missing it too. It's been clarified that the leaderboard counts actives within two weeks, but there are well above 500k active? Even narrowing to weekly numbers there are well well above 500k (connecting two separate posts)... It appears it was valid to use the leaderboard as a number gauge, but yet Tex's post wasn't representative somehow??? Only explanations that wouldn't be total political doublespeak would be there are tons tied with Tex at PR1 or a buncha people logged in becoming active again right after Tex. I'm sure the numbers do vary week to week. I'm bowing out of this thread, no reason to ruffle feathers. Anyone can track their own numbers and form their own opinion.
I don't think the rank would account for the unknown number of rank ties between 1-900. If I understand it correctly. Then any number of people could be tied at any random pirate rank above Tex. But I could be totally misunderstanding how the system works.
Dang. Now I'm gonna hafta push myself back on LB and look for ties above me! One more LP upgrade first
The top of the leaderboard seems to count pirates in a tie. Unless it's treated differently lower, this doesn't seem to explain different numbers.
What sucks now is that a quarter of the leaderboard is inactive now, and new and upcoming players take longer to jump on and stick on the leaderboards then the rate that veterans drop at.
I've seen that. I just assumed they didn't allow ties on the Leaderboards for UI purposes. As in they appear on the Leaderboards to not be tied, but on the server they are. Idk it seems like @Lynsey [Midoki] could at least explain how rank works. She could probably do that without revealing sensitive information about numbers of players.
Player numbers arent usually very private and secretive, since most games usually boast about their player count. Although, i m interested to learn more as well.
If ties aren't counted, then Tex's rank would be 200 (top 200 on LB) plus a number that is lowest PR on LB -1 (currently 500-some) because every PR rank below leaderboard would be expected to have multiple players in a tie. i.e. 200+538= 738 It just doesn't make sense that ties aren't counted except perhaps at your current PR (i.e. original point that many pirates are hanging at PR1 but a good number could be below Tex given his recent decision to become a bottom feeder). Ok, gotta finish here, now everyone go visit my latest HG pathfinding pics-crazy!
Well, the leaderboard does reflect PR ties as seen below but not leaderboard rank ties. Raises a couple of questions. First, in image below there aren't ties in leaderboard rank--just ties at the particular PR. So this changes below leaderboard rank 200 so that people can be tied in leaderboard rank? That would be very odd and inconsistent. Second, in the 500s there are only a couple of people tied at a given PR but below the leaderboard there are tens of thousands tied at a given PR? Unlikely. If there are 5 mil downloads and 'well well above 500k active pirates' there should be more than 3 people at PR 549 (which is not even a high rank). Finally, at PR 155, I am rank 22k in USA, presumably the largest market? If consistent with leaderboard there are no ties in leaderboard rank, there should be far more pirates over 155 PR than 22k in USA.