[MUD-Dev] Counting Massive Multi Players

[Castronova]

From: "Koster, Raph" rkoster at soe.sony.com

> The longer the typical play session, the higher concurrency you'll
> get with your users, without reflecting your actual
> popularity... Perhaps the best measure would be "number of users
> who log in at least once a week." Far as I know, nobody makes that
> figure public.

I would like to see several figures for each game:

  total hours played this week by all accounts = H

  number of acounts active in that week = N

  average number of accounts per person in that week = a

To me, H is the best raw measure of popularity. The best estimate of
player involvement is aH/N, average hours per player.

I don't think it's fair to say that macro'ed time or vendor time is
not play time and does not reflect popularity. I agree that we would
rather have people doing more active things, but hey, if that's how
they want to spend time in the world - AFK - it really is what they
*want* to do. So it does reflect the game's popularity to the
players. Personally, I hate macroing and much prefer SWG's markets
to EQ's. I rather liked the EC Tunnel, actually. Lots of shouting,
it made the game feel alive.

Anyway, no one is going to publish these kinds of figures. Some day,
when there's a research institute about this stuff, we will be able
to do national-level surveys to get these figures on an individual
level. Then we can gross up.

Edward Castronova
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