Soldat, losing popularity? Not as much players as in 1.3.1.

[Pie]

LOL^
Worst Graph EVAR!!!
But kind of true.

[poopdogg]

soldat will not loose it's popularity...THAT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN!!!!!

[Mitak]

This is the wrong graph. It just shows the progress of his Parkinson from his 11th birthday to recent days.

[matt]

Im sure that soldat isint losing popularity. I see alot of new players in soldat these days, and there are many empty servers because people are just testing their mods, scripts and maps or they just trying to make a cool server.

[Banksey]

People must remember as well why alot of servers are empty. In my opinion the majority of Soldat players have "Not Empty" and "Not Full" filters on, so some people wouldn't even see new servers so people wouldn't join um.

[Pie]

I've always got the Never empty filter on and i still get over 100 servers most times i click refresh.

[CardGamesFTW]

Don't forget... Not all people play online. Some players play offline with bots due to no internet or those
poor dial-up users who get ping kicked as soon as they  enter a server. As for me,
I only play on Soldat 1.3.1 and I'm sure other people play it aswell, so maybe those factors influence the seemingly less population of Soldat players.

[El_Spec]

A majority of players have moved to 1.3.1 rather than 1.4 or higher due to the fact it prevents certain people from running Soldat or due to the amount of bugs it has.  Soldat is getting larger by each day, just hard to notice it.

I actually have stopped playing 1.4.2.  I play 1.2.1 and only have 1.4.2 installed so I can use PolyWorks.  Versions past 1.4 are somewhat incompatible with it due to how powerful and how it can change polygon forms and older versions can't support it.

[Wormdundee]

The problem with the servers now is that I can NEVER find pure CTF except through gathers and when I maybe get lucky with u13 and fracs. I go down the list of all the servers below 100 ms and it's terrible.

All I see is weapon mod, weapon mod, weapon mod, climbing, SAW/LAW, Sniper/Knife, Sniper/LAW, Sniper/SAW, weapon mod, climbing, r/s, r/s, servers full of bots and any combination of these.

I just think it's a bit ridiculous that there are only 2 servers that host normal ctf.

[Clawbug]

The problem with the servers now is that I can NEVER find pure CTF except through gathers and when I maybe get lucky with u13 and fracs. I go down the list of all the servers below 100 ms and it's terrible.

All I see is weapon mod, weapon mod, weapon mod, climbing, SAW/LAW, Sniper/Knife, Sniper/LAW, Sniper/SAW, weapon mod, climbing, r/s, r/s, servers full of bots and any combination of these.

I just think it's a bit ridiculous that there are only 2 servers that host normal ctf.

QFT.

Nowadays people just play Hexer/TW/TTW, and some "unique" servers with fancy WM's, maps and weapon restrictions. 8( Thats no SOLDAT!

[Radical Terrorist]

Graph seems to scale.
My only problem is that it seems there's less "Normal" NA Servers, and mroe euro servers, which doesn't serve well for my canadian rear. The only servers with decent ping for me are the !ELITE Snipe and Slice etc... servers, which I tend to avoid cause I don't like being restricted to only one weapon.

[O.R.I.O.N.]

I'm unwillingly contributing. Until I get a new battery for my HP laptop, I can't play t3h Soldatz. My other lappy is a cheap-arse Gateway that runs Vista, and if that's not bad enough, the host processes that manage networking and most of explorer.exe's subprocesses are corrupt.

God, I can't wait for the thing to melt itself.

[Tinysmurf]

There are about 50-100 players in R/S CTF that have a small community. But yes, it does seem like there are fewer players. People in junior high and high school told their friends about this game and that's how I got involved with it. People should be doing that right now.

[Radical Terrorist]

I'm big on real, but not Survival, though I prefer both to advanced mode, which, thankfully, is pretty much obsolete with the scripts.

[DePhille]

Sorry for bumping this thread, but it's a question that I've heard numerous times and also asked myself many times during these periods.

Though I've been (and still am) extremely busy this time being, I've kept a glance at Soldat (ofcourse) and I've noticed a few factors:
- No news on main page since November the 25th 2007 or so.
- Small and medium-sized communities are dieing. I don't know why, but my guesses are that either the big communities are 'taking away' all players, 'Official Soldat Stuff' is taking away functionalities of the communities (hosting on SoldatForums for example) or Soldat's average overall playing time is decreasing (ie: Less 'veterans', more 'newbs', 'vets' tend to join small/med communities more often). Or it might even be a combination of those.
- Other factors that need charts to be illustrated such as a possible increase in the players to servers ratio or Soldat's growth slowing down.

I can contribute with only one chart though, the one of the SoldatPage Webring. The webring is on nearly all prominent Soldat sites and has google analytics on it to keep track of everything:


As you can see, the amount of visitors on Soldat's fanpages is slowly decreasing. However, if you take a larger period as base (ie: from Aug 07 to Feb 08) you'll see that Soldat's growth has stagnated or is still growing. So if there is a possible decrease in popularity, it should be in the last three to four months. The period taken for the chart is from the first of November 2007 to the first of February 2008, so shortly after the peaks caused by the new version up until the latest reliable numbers. I also made sure that the amount of sites in the webring was +/- the same during that period, I think only two to five sites were added during this period, but even then the chart shows a slow decrease.


Watch out with what kind of information you combine here. As said before, the period you use as your base is very important here.


PS: As for my activity, I can't put a date yet on when I'll be back, but I know forsure that come back sooner or later.

DePhille

[chrisgbk]

You also have to remember that a lot of players are in school, so levels fluctuate accordingly.

Stats from the forums(http://forums.soldat.pl/index.php?action=stats):

Monthly Summary	New Topics	New Posts	New Members	Most Online	Hits
February 2008(to date)	159	3147	52	122	197260
January 2008	570	9466	227	182	1042950
December 2007	751	11340	275	185	1326021
November 2007	673	11408	401	192	1333779
October 2007	681	12354	303	249	1283375
September 2007	678	12620	391	403	1186196
August 2007(1.4.2)	1103	20181	508	261	1397388
July 2007	1069	17002	533	340	1370313
June 2007(1.4.1)	1125	16625	716	431	1307712
May 2007	1147	17100	894	148	1251666
April 2007(1.4.0)	1053	16641	780	1436	1177261
March 2007	765	10579	470	93	806596
February 2007	695	9407	412	75	744471
January 2007	922	13217	495	79	813034
December 2006	829	11458	403	91	753824
November 2006	812	12171	309	70	715006
October 2006	925	14295	391	71	805441
September 2006	795	13001	383	70	758660
August 2006	1126	17893	612	74	844423
July 2006	1441	20655	752	89	761530
June 2006	1250	16247	1007	65	489122

December 2005 1.3.1 released, before these forums existed.

[.::Blaze::.]

u just see servers empty mainly because any descent player is in gathers or private servers. The only good public ones are fracs. and !elite