How much of the EOC population is bots? More than 25%.

[MPM]

I have been logging the number of players online since the release of EOC on my website.

Recently, I added the peak and average number of players for each day, which has already come in very handy.

 

This entire time, the peak number of players on Saturday has been 60,000 to 65,000 .

This weekend, it's only 45,000. This coincides with a post in the forum for a major botting program. They said that the most recent game updated broke their program and you can't use it to do anything right now.

 

So, in one weekend, the EOC population possibly dropped 23% for the loss of just one botting program. Admittedly, this is a holiday for Americans and this could have affected the number of players. I would have expected it to increase instead.

 

On the program's website, they list six other botting programs that aren't just auto clickers. I don't think they are as popular as this one, but that would definitely bring the percent up a few more points.

[ilovecuttingyews]

I'm actually slightly surprised that it's only 25%. I do welcome the weekend without bots.

[Sy_Accursed]

It's interesting, but I wonder how valid a claim you can make.

Like you said it's a holiday for Americans AND it is the bank holiday weekend in the UK (lots of people use it for a mini-break) so both those factors are likely to of impacted and without any solid data it is impossible to clarify what portion of the 25% is bot loss and what is players on holiday.

[Mercifull]

I don't think you are taking into consideration the glorious weather the UK is having, it's certainly making me play less.

[Kimberly]

without any solid data

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we typically see approx a 30% drop in online players before and after updates?

[miracleman58]

Was more interested in the decline of 07 in the last week.

 

I for one have jumped off that boat at rank 250 overall. Was fun while it lasted.

[Sy_Accursed]

without any solid data

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we typically see approx a 30% drop in online players before and after updates?

 

We do see something of that ilk but that can't be proven to be anything.

Some botters get back on nearly straight away, some players use being booted off as an incentive to take a break, some lobbying folks get booted and don't come back for many hours.

 

Same scenario as this case really, there's multiple groups/reasons for the drop and we lack any solid provable data on the make up of the whole percentage. For all we know it could be 0.5% bots and the rest real players, equally it could be the exact opposite - we just do not know.

[Kimberly]

If it pretty consistently happens every time there's an update, along with this data...

 

No, of course we can't prove it 100%, but wouldn't you say it's a pretty realistic possibility?

[Sy_Accursed]

Did I say it wasn't?

I only said you can make a valid claim about it, eg a solidly factually provable claim, because there are loopholes in the data that are unprovable.

[Fallstar]

It is probably in the region of 20-30%. Taking that into account, the concurrent player count seems very low. Rather sad.

[Kimberly]

Did I say it wasn't?

 

Mostly by implication you did, which is why I was confused. Though, I think I confused this subject with the reddit topic made about it, where the definitive statement "playerbase drop is due to a bot program being borked" wasn't made...I think...

 

Either way it's become quite clear that I chimed in while taking a mental holiday haha...sorry.

[MPM]

It's interesting, but I wonder how valid a claim you can make.

Like you said it's a holiday for Americans AND it is the bank holiday weekend in the UK (lots of people use it for a mini-break) so both those factors are likely to of impacted and without any solid data it is impossible to clarify what portion of the 25% is bot loss and what is players on holiday.

 

You are right, I was wondering if this could actually be considered as the bot population, so I did some looking around.

I found some population data for the holiday season of 2012. This is in a spreadsheet by tal_ormanda. His data is located at http://runescapetrac...logspot.com/.

I did some modifications to show average number of players per day during this time period. You can see that at https://docs.google....&usp=sharing.

The weekends(Fri,Sat, Sum) are all highlighted.

 

I expected holiday weekends to have an increase in the number of players. And... I can't really say that they did. Yes, the thanksgiving holiday does have more people online than the following weekends. And the weekends nearest Christmas and NYE have a high number of players as well... There isn't a huge difference.

I could do the same work on the data tal has for the beginning of 2013, but I don't think it will show a huge difference.

 

Even though this didn't prove what I expected, it does show that holidays don't have a massive drop in population.

 

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we typically see approx a 30% drop in online players before and after updates?

 

You are absolutely right. When the Nexus was released, I logged 44,703 players 20 mins before the update. There were only 4,585 players at 15:30. An hour later(16:30), there was 39,417 online.

 

When the God war dungeon update was released, there were 44,454 players before it happened. 11,795 immediately after the update, logged at 15:45. An hour later, there were 36,729.

 

In both cases, the number of online players rose back to the previous level in two to two and a half hours. Their peaks for that day were about the same as before.

 

Compare that to this week's update.

This week, there were 46,623 players online before the update. I logged 11,055 users shortly after the update, but there seems to be some issues. There are massive drops in population for the next 12 hours.

After that stabilizes, the graph begins acting like any other day. Only it's thousands less than it would have been on any other weekend.

 

Conclusive? No. I wish I had data for Memorial day of 2011 and 2012. But it is certainly enough to take a couple of guesses.

[Sy_Accursed]

I dunno if it'd be wise to draw data from other holiday periods for comparative sake, to me it always seemed the effect a holiday has varies greatly.

For example weekends around Xmas and NYE I always thought were sort of on par with 'normal' as whilst older players may be away doing the rounds of family and friends more kids are at home with sod all to do, where as bank holiday weekends (for the uk) always seemed a bit quiet or ukers online. Equally independence day always seems to see a slacking in US players.

Memorial Day/Spring Bank Holiday is kind of a special case in that it is a pair of specified holidays/events (opposed to weekends near xmas/nye) that occur in both US and UK in tandem opposed to most others which only occur in one locale.

 

Of course I have no hard data on the matter, just my observations over the years; would certainly be interesting to see how things appear in future data for this weekend (assuming you keep the collection going tht long)

[V O R K]

07 is even worse, more profitable and easier to bot :)

[Fallstar]

Actually that's not true. On 07 a dedicated player hopped worlds at various combat spots and literally logged the rsns of thousands of bots. The JMods on 07 then went through those accounts and banned them all. PKers are crying and whining all over the place.

 

The JMods on EoC would never manually go through thousands of accounts, which is a shame. I wish there were JMods working on the live game who cared as much as those working on 07 do.

 

Obviously the problem is that due to the 3 strike system, all of those guys only received a 2 week ban because botting apparently isn't a major offence anymore.

[purpieman2]

I'm actually slightly surprised that it's only 25%. I do welcome the weekend without bots.

I'm not surprised. As in stastistics i assume to take out 10%, and thought it was around 20%. Maybe bot killers are making some difference?

[Tempest Mike]

I wouldn't mind them actually going through and banning all the bots they find in EoC, I would love to be able to have private on without getting spammed with rwt sites.

It's also kind of ridiculous how obvious they make it - wearing the same armour all the time, even training agility in dragon and granite armour.

[Sir_Squab]

Clearly, ban everyone in a mixture of dragon and granite armour.

[Ammako]

We need to start wearing granite helmet + dragon platebody + granite legs to make fun of the bots.

[Sir_Squab]

But they're souless abominations! You think souless abominations have a sense of shame?

[PolarBearBlue]

I dunno if it'd be wise to draw data from other holiday periods for comparative sake, to me it always seemed the effect a holiday has varies greatly.

For example weekends around Xmas and NYE I always thought were sort of on par with 'normal' as whilst older players may be away doing the rounds of family and friends more kids are at home with sod all to do, where as bank holiday weekends (for the uk) always seemed a bit quiet or ukers online. Equally independence day always seems to see a slacking in US players.

Memorial Day/Spring Bank Holiday is kind of a special case in that it is a pair of specified holidays/events (opposed to weekends near xmas/nye) that occur in both US and UK in tandem opposed to most others which only occur in one locale.

 

Of course I have no hard data on the matter, just my observations over the years; would certainly be interesting to see how things appear in future data for this weekend (assuming you keep the collection going that long)

 

I think you should probably observe which non major holidays both college students in the UK and US get off, like Spring break. I can't say for the UK but it likely that whatever holiday college students get off, high school/middle school students get off as well.

 

http://controller.os...y-holidays.shtm

These are the only 10 events in a year OSU students receive time off (Spring Break makes 11). Discounting the major events we have maybe 5 or 7.

 

http://www.shr.illin...le_2012-13.html

Mostly the same here minus the reduced service days (Whatever that is, not my school). By comparison

 

http://www.cps.edu/c...entDaysOff.aspx

There are more days students get off not mentioned here. So I'd start here then see the events the UK and US share.

[Sy_Accursed]

Uk only gets standard bank holidays as listed here:

https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays

 

Scotland and Ireland have a few they skip/a few extra subject to region but generally those are the 8 we all get.

Other than that there's just 6 week summer holiday, 2 weeks xmas, 2 weeks easter and 3 weeks of 'halfterm' midway through each school term (so 1 like oct/nov-ish, one like feb/mar-ish and one round about may/june); many schools don't observe the same dates for these, especially as you get higher up the education chain (eg universities generally don't have half term, mine had 3 week xmas and 12 week summer)

Other than that we just get a handful of 'teacher training days' and sometimes 'study leave' or 'reading week' all dependant on where you go.

[Yoko Kurama]

It's possible, but without any hard data, it's just conjecture. I know I have been away for the month of may on a hiatus because of the lackluster update schedule.

[purpieman2]

Clearly, ban everyone in a mixture of dragon and granite armour.

Only if found guilty of using macro services also, clearly.