Homecoming player count: a year in review

[wjrasmussen]

19 hours ago, Snarky said:

Tony Stark had dancing girls when he made his presentation.  Just sayin'...

But also:

[tidge]

7 hours ago, TheZag said:

 

I was able to recover the data from the missing portion of the graph

 

 

 

I thought I noticed an anomaly, so I zoomed in

 

 

[Spankea]

20 hours ago, macskull said:

"Homecoming is dying."

 

"The servers are empty, no one plays anymore."

 

"It's so hard to find teams even on Excelsior."

 

"The lower-population servers are a ghost town."

 

"Fire Blast is in desparate need of buffs."

 

"Regen is a good set when you use an entire tray of oranges and purples every fight."

 

Have you or a friend heard someone utter those phrases, or ones like them, ingame or on the forums? Or even on Discord? Well, here's some cold hard data.

 

Background:

 

Last March I was curious about player count because it felt like less people were playing, but I had no actual data to back up my feelings. Sure, the HC Discord has player count statistics, but they only go back seven days so they're kind of useless for long-term analysis. I initially started my tracking by manually checking player counts from the server status page at a certain time once a week. This was fine, unless I didn't have an internet connection at 6PM on a Saturday, or I forgot to check, or I forgot to write down the number, or Mercury was in tardigrade, or Corey was in the house, or whatever else the cosmos could dream up to disrupt my plans. Oh, and I was about to drop off the face of the earth for half a year with no way to even get onto the internet, let alone update anything at all, and a tracking system like this that relies on manual labor is definitely not going to work when the person doing that labor isn't around to do it. "Surely there must be a better way," I thought.

 

Turns out, there is.

 

Enter Python and my "the only coding experience I have is a few months of Java 15 years ago and even then I could barely make a functional program" self. Turns out, you don't really have to write your own code from scratch when what you need is 90% complete somewhere else - you just have to find the pieces you want and put them together, then make them work for your specific task. In my case, I wanted a script that would do the following things:

1. Pull the player numbers from the server status page.
2. Put those numbers into a Google Sheets document.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 at a certain interval.
4. Use Google Sheets to determine the maximum player count for each server (and total) for a given day.
5. Graph these maximums.

 

Simple, yeah? Not so much. So many headaches. Took me a solid 3 days of tweaking code and tweaking my Sheets document to get things working. Google Sheets is weird about filters and zeroes, so I had to get creative with Google's query language to get the data in a format that would give a user-friendly graph.

 

The result:

 

A 50ish-line Python script which does everything in steps 1 and 2 above, an AWS virtual host which handles running the script every 15 minutes (and hosts everything since my computer is not always online), and a Google Sheets document with... just a few lines of data.

 

 

Today's the one-year anniversary of when I got the whole thing up and running, so here's a year in review!

 

So, player numbers did what, exactly?

 

 

This. They did this. (Ignore those weird dips in January and February, the script pulled no data for a week or so for some unknown reason). There are some significant dates for the peaks and valleys:

1. 28 August 2022: Issue 27 Page 4 released. 2378 peak players, almost 200 more than any other day over the past year.
2. 25 December 2022: Christmas. 1450 peak players. Makes sense, right?
3. The release date for Issue 27 Page 5 isn't statistically significant and is buried somewhere in those peaks in mid-October 2022.

 

More macro analysis: player numbers are roughly similar to where they were this time a year ago. They peak in the summer then fall off in November and December.

 

TL;DR: Reports of Homecoming's death are greatly exaggerated. That being said, there is extreme stratification in the server populations. Excelsior tends to have a population greater than the other four servers combined and Indomitable and Reunion really are mostly empty. I suspect there is nothing that can be done about this, but player population and proportional share of server population has remained relatively stable so I suspect we're simply sitting at a baseline. In other words, the people who are still playing the game four years after it came back into the public eye are here to stay, and any large population changes (down or up) aren't going to happen.

 

One more thing: If you want to play around with an interactive version of the graph above, check the links in my signature.

When page 4 and 5 came out a lot of people made a lot of effort including myself to get old players back into CoH.  We'll see if it was just a one year wonder or if the typical annual decline shows it's head again.

[Snarky]

4 minutes ago, Spankea said:

When page 4 and 5 came out a lot of people made a lot of effort including myself to get old players back into CoH.  We'll see if it was just a one year wonder or if the typical annual decline shows it's head again.

Well Cosmic Council shows no signs of returning.  Kind of wish there were other solid SGs like that on each server. Organized, regular, very competent.  You know, the basics.

[Mezmera]

8 minutes ago, Snarky said:

Well Cosmic Council shows no signs of returning.  Kind of wish there were other solid SGs like that on each server. Organized, regular, very competent.  You know, the basics.

 

I have a SG for you although we only take limited applicants but we occasionally do have tryouts.

 

[Xiddo]

16 minutes ago, Snarky said:

Well Cosmic Council shows no signs of returning.  Kind of wish there were other solid SGs like that on each server. Organized, regular, very competent.  You know, the basics.

Sovereignty/ Sovereign pretty much cover this on Excel I’d say. I end up teaming with lots of em.

 

Whatever happened to CC? Also understand if you’d rather not say. I swear I saw one a couple of days ago.

[Number Six]

3 hours ago, macskull said:

It isn’t possible to count unique players without IP address data, and I’m not certain even the devs have that level of fidelity.

 

It might be doable but it would be a lot of work to disambiguate it for concurrent users.

 

What I do have handy is my log analysis of the launcher files. Since almost everybody generally has to run the launcher to make sure they're up to date, I'm able to gather stats on unique IPs. This is more analogous of active players rather than concurrent, since not everybody plays at the same time and not everybody plays every day of the week.

 

Between April 15 and April 27, there were 28,613 unique IP addresses that were used to launch the game.

 

Report Range: 2023-04-15 through 2023-04-27

Total unique users       : 28613

Manifest-based           : 6522
HC Launcher              : 22091
New HC Launcher installs : 1317

Launcher OS breakdown:
windows-11-x86-32        : 510
windows-11-x86-64        : 6867
windows-10-server-x86-64 : 1
windows-10-x86-32        : 1453
windows-10-x86-64        : 11562
windows-7-x86-32         : 46
windows-7-x86-64         : 416
windows-8-x86-64         : 2
windows-8_1-x86-32       : 13
windows-8_1-x86-64       : 88
windows-xp-x86-32        : 2
wine                     : 1131

Manifest-based launcher breakdown:
Island Rum               : 210
Other                    : 310
PenguinRocks             : 2
Tequila                  : 6000

 

Interesting trivia: between the same time period exactly 1 year ago (April 15 - April 27, 2022), there were only 24,390 unique IPs.

 

Since people sometimes change IPs or play from multiple places that measure probably overcounts somewhat. But it's not too far off from our weekly account stats which sees about 16k unique accounts active in a week, or 22k unique accounts active in a month.

[Snarky]

27 minutes ago, Xiddo said:

Sovereignty/ Sovereign pretty much cover this on Excel I’d say. I end up teaming with lots of em.

 

Whatever happened to CC? Also understand if you’d rather not say. I swear I saw one a couple of days ago.

There is still a toon here or there in the SG.  But the core leadership (Who hosted weekly Incarnate Trials including Master Magisterium every Saturday, and nightly content 99% time...) just all up and went to a different game.  Now WoW, but something like it.  I know they had "done" everything on CoH, with many holding speed run times and all the badges.  Still, seemed wild. It is dead there now.

[Glacier Peak]

49 minutes ago, Number Six said:

 

It might be doable but it would be a lot of work to disambiguate it for concurrent users.

 

What I do have handy is my log analysis of the launcher files. Since almost everybody generally has to run the launcher to make sure they're up to date, I'm able to gather stats on unique IPs. This is more analogous of active players rather than concurrent, since not everybody plays at the same time and not everybody plays every day of the week.

 

Between April 15 and April 27, there were 28,613 unique IP addresses that were used to launch the game.

 

Report Range: 2023-04-15 through 2023-04-27

Total unique users       : 28613

Manifest-based           : 6522
HC Launcher              : 22091
New HC Launcher installs : 1317

Launcher OS breakdown:
windows-11-x86-32        : 510
windows-11-x86-64        : 6867
windows-10-server-x86-64 : 1
windows-10-x86-32        : 1453
windows-10-x86-64        : 11562
windows-7-x86-32         : 46
windows-7-x86-64         : 416
windows-8-x86-64         : 2
windows-8_1-x86-32       : 13
windows-8_1-x86-64       : 88
windows-xp-x86-32        : 2
wine                     : 1131

Manifest-based launcher breakdown:
Island Rum               : 210
Other                    : 310
PenguinRocks             : 2
Tequila                  : 6000

 

Interesting trivia: between the same time period exactly 1 year ago (April 15 - April 27, 2022), there were only 24,390 unique IPs.

 

Since people sometimes change IPs or play from multiple places that measure probably overcounts somewhat. But it's not too far off from our weekly account stats which sees about 16k unique accounts active in a week, or 22k unique accounts active in a month.

Windows XP????? ARE YOU OKAY?

[Uun]

29 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:

Windows XP????? ARE YOU OKAY?

They always said you could run this game on a toaster.

[tidge]

1 hour ago, Glacier Peak said:

Windows XP????? ARE YOU OKAY?

 

I swear it isn't me, but in 2019 I did verify I could launch the game (using Tequila) with a repurposed prototype device that had Windows XP as its core. This was a quasi-embedded system without a dedicated graphics card... so yeah, this was ugly.

[twozerofoxtrot]

1 hour ago, Glacier Peak said:

Windows XP????? ARE YOU OKAY?

 

I saw that and Windows 8 and thought "who hurt you?"

 

 

[Number Six]

5 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

Windows XP????? ARE YOU OKAY?

 

Believe it or not our 32-bit launcher* and game builds go to great lengths so that they can still run on that old clunker that's been running XP since when the game released, the one that's somehow still alive and kicking in defiance of all the odds.

 

What makes me sad is our brave, lonesome Windows Vista player seems to have either left or upgraded finally.

 

* Edit: The Homecoming launcher uses a third-party library for TLS 1.2 support to work around XP's schannel.dll only supporting TLS 1.0, effectively cutting it off from most of the modern Internet.

[BlackHearted]

Great stuff Mac 👍

[Techwright]

On 4/28/2023 at 11:39 PM, Number Six said:

What makes me sad is our brave, lonesome Windows Vista player seems to have either left or upgraded finally.

 

As  a humble desktop tech, seeing no Vista thrills me.  There's still some common sense left in the world. 

 

[lemming]

Up until last year, I was running HC from a 2012 Windows 7 laptop.

[Ruin Mage]

Homecoming is dead! It's dying!

DOOOOOOM.

For real though the data is pretty fucking cool.

[Luminara]

30 minutes ago, Shadeknight said:

Homecoming is dead! It's dying!

[Shred Monkey]

On 4/28/2023 at 6:58 PM, twozerofoxtrot said:

 

I saw that and Windows 8 and thought "who hurt you?"

 

 

 

My name is Shred Monkey, and I have a laptop that runs Windows 8. 

 

Actually, true story.  I'm probably one of those in the stats.  Last month I pulled one of my old laptops out of storage to try to get my son interested in playing with me.  I didn't bother to upgrade  windows when I saw it wasn't going to be free (or easy, anyway).  It ran the game just fine.  Not as well as it runs on my machine, but....  <dad voice> Nobody touches Daddy's laptop.

 

 

Edited May 2, 2023 by Shred Monkey

[nihilii]

Very cool! Thank you for doing this.

[carroto]

On 4/28/2023 at 4:31 PM, Number Six said:

Between April 15 and April 27, there were 28,613 unique IP addresses that were used to launch the game.

 

That just counts the launchers?  If so you can add +1.  I don't use a launcher, just a raw text-based updater on Linux, so I imagine that I don't show up there at all.  Oh wait that's when page 6 came out so I did have to run it, so maybe I am counted in the "other" category.

 

On 4/28/2023 at 4:31 PM, Number Six said:

wine                     : 1131

 

More than I would have expected.  Even so I'd guess the majority of those are Macs.  Interesting.

[carroto]

On 4/28/2023 at 8:46 AM, Uun said:

I'm surprised there's not a downward slope on Torch. I've been spending more of my time on Excel (and moving characters from Torch to Excel) due to the low population and many of my friends have been doing the same. 

 

On 4/28/2023 at 8:49 AM, Clave Dark 5 said:

The characters I liked I moved ages ago, maybe that's been common too.

 

Yeah it's a real shame these numbers don't go back further.  The mass exodus from Torch began well over a year ago.  I held on as long as I could but by the time there was nothing in LFG but tumbleweeds I figured it was time for me to go, too.  Seems like there were a couple of waves.  Initially a lot of people were splitting their time between Torch and Excel, and then once people started to notice the slowdown and also switch over it just snowballed and went fast downhill.  It would be great to see that in the graph.  Things had probably already stabilized at their new lower level with just the die-hards hanging on before these data started being collected.

[Nightwatch]

Good to see hard evidence indicating no actual decline but my question is, is there any actual attempt by any groups (players or GMs) to increase populations?  I would like to see that and would be happy to contribute where I can.

 

Over the past week on REUNION, I've had exactly one team, tried to form several myself and had no luck, and missed several GMs through simple lack of interest.  This is not just because of 'a bad time of day'.  I've had very little luck on MOST days, including European weekends at all hours. 

 

Also is there any discussion of amalgamating low population servers to provide critical mass?

Edited May 31, 2023 by Nightwatch

[Wavicle]

Interestingly, Fire Blast DID get buffed...Regen still hasn't though...

[UltraAlt]

1 hour ago, Nightwatch said:

I would like to see that and would be happy to contribute where I can.

 

You could make social media posts and post on gaming sites.

 

1 hour ago, Nightwatch said:

Over the past week on Defiant

 

Well, there is no Defiant Homecoming server.

So I'm unsure where you're playing on "Defiant".

 

1 hour ago, Nightwatch said:

Also is there any discussion of amalgamating low population servers to provide critical mass?

 

You can move characters to other servers if you want to.