BabylonCome wrote:I beg to differ - I would say that current player numbers are about 40% less then they were 6 months ago and about 60% less then just after when 0.85 got released (which was the last major patch), which out of interest was nearly 12 months ago...
I've been playing PR for well over 2 years and the problem at the moment is the lack of new content, everyone is getting seriously board with the current maps...
Please don't get me wrong, as I have said many a time before, what the Dev's have done here is awesome and max respect for that - gotta be The Best mod ever but to keep the interest up, there is a need for new maps to be released every 4 or 5 months and not once a year.
As the above gentlemen have basically said - I'm afraid you're wrong. We track the number of unique players on PR, daily. We know how many users log into PR, and we know for how long they play. My numbers aren't picked out of thin air, or even based on forum polls, or based on my own observation of servers.
A shade under twenty-one thousand players logged into PR last month. On
average, they played for 2.5 hours a day, each.The drop from "highest-ever monthly total" is around one-fifth to one-quarter; over six months. As I've said - this about the same as the usual decline observed between new versions. As the decline is pretty consistent, I think it's more to do with an average - X number of players install a new release - 75-80% of them will continue to play six months on (even if only a very little), 20-25% of them will not, which is fair enough - and still a pretty bloody good success rate.
Yes, there's a shortage of "Made for PR" maps, but believe me, a good map takes a long time - up to a year - and we only have so many established mappers capable of putting out a PR-standard map within that kind of timescale. The community-made maps usually take at least as long, and also utilise "established-mapper" time in terms of advice, checking on quality, etc.
From first concept to map-in-game, for a 2km-square map (the minimum for PR, now) you're talking a good fourteen months, as more or less the minimum.
So pulling out a new map from the team every four or five months is a little hard.
Trust me though, there is plenty of new content in 0.9 and it *will* keep you sated until the release after that...
