The server is up
There are 180 hearthlings playing.
Dead game
And who would contradict such obvious implications?
Indeed, the accompanying graph surely speaks for itself!
it doesn't take a degree in statistics to notice a downward trend in population
Smoking doesn't cause cancer
Sir R. A. Fisher (1890-1962) was one of the greatest statisticians of all time, perhaps most noted for the idea of analysis of variance. But he sullied his reputation by arguing strongly that smoking does not cause cancer. He had some sensible arguments. First, he rightfully pointed out our Warning Sign I7, correlation is not causation. He was clever at coming up with alternative scenarios: perhaps lung cancer causes an irritation that the patient can feel long before it can be diagnosed, such that the irritation is alleviated by smoking. Or perhaps there is some unknown common cause that leads to both cancer and a tendency to smoke. Fisher was also correct in pointing out Warning Sign D1, lack of randomized trials: we can't randomly separate children at birth and force one group to smoke and the other not to. (Although we can do that with animal studies.) But he was wrong to be so dismissive of reproducible studies, in humans and animals, that showed a strong correlation, with clear medical theories explaining why smoking could cause cancer, and no good theories explaining the correlation any other way. He was wrong not to see that he may have been influenced by his own fondness for smoking a pipe, or by his libertarian objections to any interference with personal liberties, or by his employ as a consultant for the tobacco industry. Fisher died in 1962 of colon cancer.
From Peter Norvig's essay "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation". So let's try to be as clever (and possibly as wrong) as Ronald Fisher.
What are we tracking, anyway?
The Player Count [PC] tracks how many unique IPs are logged into the game, at a specific point in time. It does not track how many people actively play the game. Most people seem to believe, though, that PC is a good indicator of how many people actually play the game, we should however, not be so hasty, and try to figure out some possible confounding factors.
A better indicator would be: "How many unique IPs logged in during week X?", only loftar knows the answer to that though, the haven statistics previously mentioned do not reveal this number.
Player Behavior
In legacy haven, the slider mechanic incentivized keeping characters logged in and idling for the first few days to get to full Change. That this inflated PC was obvious to most people. However, as this mechanic mostly inflated PC for the first few days of the world, it doesn't really apply to our situation. I believe there are more mechanics that inflated PC, although, they might not be as obvious.
- Base building and industry, this is one activity that keeps players online in the start of the world, but tapers out over time.
- Foraging, in legacy haven, one would need to constantly log on to forage to get some of the better curiosities, most agree that foraging has taken a backseat in the current version.
- Looking for trouble/company, as the world is bigger than ever before, there is little incentive to go out and look around randomly, as encounters are much more rare in this world than in previous worlds.
- Mapping, this one goes in both directions. Since the world is bigger there is more to map and explore, more far-flung resource nodes &c. However, a lot of people will find that knowing anything other than their immediate area, or even their base, is less important now than it used to be.
- Farming/Mining, mining is obviously more important for curios now than before, I am unsure however, that it takes longer to mine enough for curios for one's character now than it previously did. When it comes to farming I'm unsure as to whether it is more important or less important than it used to be. It has for sure become more efficient than legacy for a lot of people, given the built-in automation (very similar to the old farming scripts).
- Extreme grinding, since the hunger bar has come into play, starving oneself to eat an unlimited amount of food is no longer an option. High quality symbel increased the amount of food one can stuff one's characters with, but even so, the more extreme cases of grinding, and extreme amounts of farming it required has diminished.
- Older player base, if the player base is mostly older (in terms of having played before) players coming back (assumption!), this would entail an older (in terms of age) player base, probably with less time to spend in the game than before
I'm sure there are many more behaviors that have changed, that affect PC in one way or the other. Now, some might say that some of these changed behaviors I list are actually "people being less active" (and for some of the points I would agree), but to me it seems that the game simply requires less time online, once the basics are up and running, than previously. This iteration of the game was designed to be more casual, of course that is bound to affect PC. I'd caution anyone to equate "less time spent online" with "player drop-off".
Oscillations: Fallout 4/Midterms/Finals
It's natural for a game to oscillate in activity due to real life factors, such oscillations can sometimes strengthen trends. For instance, if we expect a lot of people to spend time in the game to build their bases/industry for the first few weeks, and right after there's a temporary oscillation downwards, this can make it seem like a much stronger downward trend than it actually is. Even worse, since we're measuring PC the way we're measuring it, these oscillations might affect time spent in the game by a lot, which would affect PC, while the person who is, for instance, temporarily cramming for finals week, might still be as active as real life allow him/her.
P2P Time Economics
As the game has moved to a model where there are Free Accounts, Verified Accounts, and Subscribed Accounts, a lot of people are being a lot more economical with their time logged into the game than they would have otherwise been. This, quite obviously affects PC.
What other data do we have?
Older players will have some inkling about how many of their friends from previous worlds are actively playing, and can, with some effort, contrast that to the situation in previous worlds, and take into account that they probably have a larger network this world, than the previous. To me, from looking at this, it's not super obvious that this world would have a stronger downwards trend than previous worlds, but I do notice a slight trend, although, my anecdotal "data" is probably both 1) not representative, and 2) affected by various biases and flawed memories.
If loftar would be more forthcoming with actual numbers that would be appreciated.
Conclusion
It's easy to make quick comments and extrapolate from Player Count, but often, the extrapolations would only hold if PC is a good indicator of player drop-off or not, and we simply lack the data to say that it does or that it doesn't, and therefor the claim that the player base is shrinking is mostly based on anecdotal evidence and conjecture. Since we can't be sure if players are dropping off, or at what rate, we should also be careful with blaming certain game changes with the conjectured drop-off.
