Logging number of players online since 8th of June

[Wessan]

You know what my be quite useful would be to track deaths of players on different servers. This could potentially point out things like bots on worlds like 84 for LRC and other worlds known to have botters in certain locations.

 

This may be a bit too complicated, but it was a spur of the moment idea I had while mining today and people were talking about bots and dying (as usual).

As far as I'm aware, there is no way to record total deaths on any world for any length of time.

 

Well, Like I said, spur of the moment idea.

 

I still find the data interesting and would like to see trends over several months. Make some hypotheses: higher number of players in the summer, possibly a 7-10% increase between June and the beginning of September; more peaks and valleys during the fall and spring days due to specific times that people play rather than in the summer when it can be all day. These two come from the assumption the player base is still in school mainly middle and high school in America. Im sure there are more that could be tested.

[Mil]

Well, Like I said, spur of the moment idea.

 

I still find the data interesting and would like to see trends over several months. Make some hypotheses: higher number of players in the summer, possibly a 7-10% increase between June and the beginning of September; more peaks and valleys during the fall and spring days due to specific times that people play rather than in the summer when it can be all day. These two come from the assumption the player base is still in school mainly middle and high school in America. Im sure there are more that could be tested.

 

Here is the last year from June 20th 2010 to June 20th 2011, the effect of free trade+wilderness/bots is visible:

 

 

Here is the year 2010 (so the effect of Wilderness is removed), it clearly shows the obvious trend of RuneScape players increasing during school holidays:

 

Data goes back to 2007, raw data is not accessible (no-one really cares to do any statistical tests). It's not my website that generates the graphs, so I don't want to post it as I'm sure if a lot of users generate graphs it won't be too good for the server it's hosted on. But it's not hard to figure out what the website URL is.

Hopefully this clears up any questions and/or doubts about player numbers and the trends over the last couple of years.

[RSBDavid]

I just started logging player count as well:

 

My log looks like this:

198,834 people currently online - 20/06/11 : 21:01:13
198,683 people currently online - 20/06/11 : 21:11:31
198,679 people currently online - 20/06/11 : 21:11:42
198,662 people currently online - 20/06/11 : 21:11:52
198,581 people currently online - 20/06/11 : 21:12:03
198,004 people currently online - 20/06/11 : 21:12:19
197,861 people currently online - 20/06/11 : 21:12:31
198,348 people currently online - 20/06/11 : 21:12:42

 

Performed via php, initiated via Java every ~10 seconds since my host chron jobs is broken. When I want to graph it, I will just sort via date then parse out other junk.

[Wessan]

Nice! Mil's graphs prove my hypotheses!

 

I found that exciting, even though they werent difficult predictions.

[ixfd64]

@OP

 

Just curious, what technique do you use to record the data? I know that it can be easily done by using regular expressions and a data mining program like R. I assume that you did something like this?

[Master_Smither]

Pretty interesting how the peaks and valleys are less evident during the summer and christmas time. I guess it indicates a large amount players playing late in the evening, compared to most player having to log off for school. We're just a bunch of no lifers it seems :P.

[miracleman58]

Graphs make everything easier to read, Thanks for Graphing it.

[292_yo]

@OP

 

Just curious, what technique do you use to record the data? I know that it can be easily done by using regular expressions and a data mining program like R. I assume that you did something like this?

#!/bin/bash

WGETRESULT=`wget -q --no-cache -O- http://www.runescape.com/title.ws | egrep '[0-9]+,[0-9]+ people' | sed -r 's/<span id="PlayerCount">([0-9]+)$
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]
then
WGETRESULT="ERROR $?"
fi

echo "`date +%s`,$WGETRESULT" >> /storage/public/Random/rs.txt

 

 

 

[Saradomin_Mage]

You know what my be quite useful would be to track deaths of players on different servers. This could potentially point out things like bots on worlds like 84 for LRC and other worlds known to have botters in certain locations.

 

This may be a bit too complicated, but it was a spur of the moment idea I had while mining today and people were talking about bots and dying (as usual).

As far as I'm aware, there is no way to record total deaths on any world for any length of time.

If you're ever interested/piqued enough, you could go to Lumbridge and look at a signboard that shows the total number of deaths on that world. I don't know when it generates from (maybe 0000GMT?), but it may be of interest nonetheless.

You could even get a bot to record this for you! [/sarcasm]