Hey everyone :)
You may have noticed the numbers on the /games page are significantly higher than they were just yesterday.
As it turns out, the old algorithm to determine Active Players did not account for IL runners (and some other stuff) - this has now been fixed!
You will also notice that player stats will match up between the /games page and any respective leaderboard :)
Enjoy your weekend everybody!
Could we get some insight on how the active player count is calculated? @Meta Like how is being "active" defined?
Update on how active players is calculated:
It's actually as simple as all registered & unregistered (those without an account) runners for full game & individual levels in the last 60 days
Previously, active players were calculated with only registered runners on full game only in the last 30 days - there were also apparently some other arbitrary restrictions.
This may not be the final form of the active player algorithm, but it's how it is right now :) Always open to making tweaks
I have a suggestion for "active players" or maybe a new similar displayed number: How about you display the registered users which have streamed the game in the last come up with a decent number days? The idea being that sometimes runners grind a lot but don't PB. So maybe you could show how active people are grinding.
Maybe we could come up with some nice ways to filter out when runners are just casually playing (like the old [nosrl] tag maybe?). So that this number is not too wrong :D idk, just a spontanious idea
Including streamers is a nice idea, but a lot of people grind offline, or stream on things other than Twitch that you can't really factor in. Also I honestly can't remember the last time I saw someone bother to deliberately tag their stream with [nosrl], even if people know it's a thing nobody's going to care enough to bother. IMO doing it based on submitted runs in the last 2 months seems fine to me, it'll miss some people that haven't PB'd in a while and are still grinding, but it'll also include people who submitted a run and will never play the game again, so it evens out. Ultimately there's no real way for it to be 100% accurate.
there was that one site you connect your livesplit to so you could possibly use stats from that and it would innclude offline grind too. but similiar problem as with the [nosrl] tag is that probably no one who isnt using that site already will bother
Yeah that still ends up having the same problems. Nobody's gonna install a LiveSplit component specifically to help make the site's stats slightly more accurate. Not everyone even uses LiveSplit. Not everyone even uses a proper timer at all.