5 Million Players? Yeah right! And for the kool-aid drinkers who will say there are 4.5 million players sharing rank #1... I say bullocks to that! Perhaps you had 5 million downloads, but less than 10% playing. Based on the fact that I see the same islands over and over, I'd bet it's closer to 5,000 active players.
Yeah, It's hard to believe. It feels like even less than 5k players when you move up and down the ranks. Would be interesting for Midoki to release the stats on pirates holding each rank 1-150. It's a big reason I've taken a big break from the game--it felt like I was wasting time on a dying game.
Has anyne gone to PR zero to see how many are above? It's not an exact science but it sure is a good indication
I hate seeing the same bases all the time seems like a small community to me even from way up here on the bluff of my fjord!!!
Total downloads is way above 5M now. That figure was from Dec 9 2014. Lots of downloads since, and then Android came out. Obviously a lot of those players have *cough* sailed away, but it's my understanding that inactives are removed from those leaderboard rankings after a few weeks, so I'd think the number is well above 500k.
They could have 100 million downloads and it wouldn't mean squat. It's only active players that mean anything.
Tex posted a ranking of just under 500k at the lowest PR available. We all know there are a good number of abandoned bases, so number of active bases would likely be less than Tex's post. How do you make the leap to well above 500k? He's talking active player numbers, not downloads.
I'm not allowed to give exact numbers, but we do indeed have well, well above 500k active users (our server guys would probably find their lives a bit easier if it was that low ). Inactive players are culled after two weeks. Our main issue at the moment is that many players deliberately drop rank (the majority of active PH9 players are at PR 100 - 250, for example). We're currently looking at ways to give players an incentive to raise and maintain their rank, instead of squatting in the lower end.
Thank you. This has been badly needed for a LONG time. When a player maxes out there is nothing to do. Pushing rank would be fun if it was worth while. To do this, you have to make pr more available to high rank players--such as dropping the matching system and let same ph levels hit each other no matter where ranked and base pr gains on base strength instead of so heavily focused on pr. I've been saying this for A LONG time that the current system kills ranking up. You also need to add a loot bonus system based on rank that will help subsidize troop costs. Add rank leagues with loot bonuses increasing by leagues. To me these are very simple fixes and should come sooner rather than later. I'd still be playing if battling for top rank wasn't broken. At least that would give me something to do until long-term content (like war) is added that gives maxed players something fun to focus on. LPs, although have some entertainment value, are not keeping long-term pirates. A word of caution, however. Don't penalize top pirates for dropping rank, such as by limiting the loot they can get. That will cause rebellion and uproar. They still need to be able to farm. Just take away their protection by opening them up to attack. Many will raise rank if dropping doesn't protect their loot.
@Lynsey [Midoki] If there truly are more than 500k active players, how come I always see the exact same players when getting matched? Maybe it's another bug. But truly sucks to see the same over and over. Not to mention I always get attacked by the same people. Also, maybe you should consider not deactivating bases after only 2 weeks. We could all use more abandoned bases to loot from. There is a severe shortage of gold/grog across the board. It's making the game not fun!
I hope she'll correct me (and clue us in) if this has changed, but the way it was explained long ago, when you sign on, you're placed into a pool of potential matches for that session. That pool contains people who are 1. offline, 2. within your PH/PR range, and 3. not shielded. This is done for server and client performance reasons. (Building a list of 500 potential matches is way less of a hit than 500k, and would also be much faster for allowing rapid Nexting). If that's still how it works, since there are any "repeat visitors" in matching, IMO, that pool size needs to be expanded a bit. Also,in one update, Chris posted on the forum and (IIRC) in the release notes base deactivation for matching was expanded to 28 days. Has that changed to 2 weeks? Or is it 2 weeks for the leaderboard, and 28 days for matching?
Like Lynsey said. Bases are removed from the list after 2 weeks inactivity. If you're at PR1 and your board rank is 489k, that means there are around 489k active bases (Actually, more than that when you add in PR1s who ranked lower than you bc of the tiebreaker). Now of those 489k bases, naturally some have quit in the last 2 weeks and haven't been removed yet. But suggesting that 95% of those players are inactive? That makes no sense. The issue of matching the same people repeatedly has been around since the very beginning. It's not a new thing, nor have I seen it getting any worse in recent months. If the game matched you vs the entire player pool every time you hit Next, your client would crash, and Lynsey would be blasting the server room with a fire extinguisher.
