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O čem je toďten plk: Happy New Year Fencer & all the gamers here.....
Tomorrow, we will open a new book. It’s pages are blank. We will put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day 2012.
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Mélusine: I thought about that, yes, and I actually know a family that does it. I meant that all three in combination give a pretty good indicator (and members of the family might even play each other a lot, which is absolutely ok). So maybe there are more indicators needed...
pedestrian: To fill tournaments the number of paying members is, I would suggest, a better measure than active members. It is also a lot easier to keep track of. Currently rooks 432, Knights 55 and Bishops 20.
Aganju: I don't totally agree when you say that we can catch a multi nick with the comparison of the IP address, because it can happen that several members of a same family play with the same PC and don't cheat. Example : one of the member of the family makes his moves and when he has finished, the other one logs on the site and plays, and each one has his own nick. It happens with teenagers who don't have enough money to get their own PC.
rod03801: Yes, that's my impression too. But how many are there? Out of the 2000 to 3000 active profiles, how many are here to play (board!) games, and how many are just hanging around? To estimate those numbers, I guess you would have to have access to the server and do what Aganju suggests.
What I'd like to do is to somehow find out if the number of actual people on the site is going up or down. Those multis are disturbing my circles...
Aganju: In my experience, a significant number of multi nics on this site, are here for other reasons than cheating. Many have mind games going on, rather than board games.
pedestrian: The multi-nick (or 'cheater') topic has been discussed a lot, also on other game sites. On the server end, there are some pretty efficient ways to catch them: 1. IP address comparison. 2. Whenever a user logs on, store the IDs that logged off in the previous three minutes. After ten times, if the same ID is in the list too often, it's with high probability a multi nick. 3. Compare the lists from 1. and 2. with who plays whom. Same user IDs come up, there you go.
You can imagine that with some fiddling and tuning, this would be rather efficient. Unfortunately, you need to have server access, as the IP address for example is otherwise private data.
The next question would be - what do you do with multi-nicks? Delete them and lose all running games? Remove any positive rating efffects from playing between them?
Aganju: Yes, the number of active profiles is probably in the 2000-3000 range.
Then there's a "background noise" of people who log on once, then leave again. Seems to be (roughly) 5000 a year, or 100 a week.
And there's some "multinicks" like Bwild suggested, people who keep multiple accounts for whatever reason. But it won't be easy to make an estimate of those.
I may try to keep track of these numbers over time and see if there is any significant change.
pedestrian: Well, realistically, 'active' would mean to me logged on in the last weeks, not even a month, so we look at less than 3000 active users. On the other hand, that's a lot of people to play with!
coan.net: Thanks, that's great - very helpful! Now we're getting somewhere :-)
I get these stats:
Number of profiles logged in the last...
... 24 hours: 1907
... 48 hours: 2218
... week: 2617
... month: 3188
... year: 7695
This is a long shot, but does anybody have any idea about the corresponding numbers from earlier times? Did the number of active members go up or down?
Aganju: Not looking at any particular time frame, actually. I'll more or less sign up for anything, unless the tournament is designed to take decades.
You're probably right that large tournaments might have a periodic impact on the level of activity, but my hunch is based on long time observations anyway. It just feels like the number of "usual suspects" has decreased.
pedestrian: Which time frame are you looking at with that statement? When I joined in July, I went into any tournament I could find. After a while, I had over 600 running games, so I slowed down considerably. Then, Adventure X and the Continental Championships started, which gave me 800 more games, so I even removed myself from some pending tournaments. My point: can such large tournaments make the kind of impact you see? Once I get back down under 500 games, I will start joining again, and maybe many others too?
Thad: I get the feeling that the number of active members in slowly decreasing; it seems increasingly difficult to fill tournaments up. But I don't know, it's only a hunch. Maybe Fencer can enlighten us?
Bwild: So what's your point? Of course BK has not 100000 active distinct users. Nobody thought that. You believe that FaceBook has 800000000 active distinct users??
Thad: there are those that repeatedly log in under different user names on a dailly basis. throws a big wrench in the numbers game....but hey....looks good on paper. lol
I'd be curious to know how many of the 100,000 users have logged in in the last week, month, and year (or maybe six months). Seems like that would give the best indicator of just how many users there are here.
(do skréše) Ťokni na špilošovo méno a pak na oddil Okončeny špile, pak na méno špila a nakonec na orčité špil, nad kerym tak možeš přeméšlet do aleluja. (Servant) (okázat šecke vechetávke)