ArmAGraph - a Arma population overview

[jerryhopper 286]

At 16 novembre this year, ArmedAssault hit the Czech market, and soon after that the german version became available and seemingly stirred up the world of online gamers.

With Operation flashpoint as its example, Armed Assault promises to be a fun and lasting game.

Several reviews came up with impressive ratings, 4 out of 5 stars, and others with an average of 85%.

also, in the Czech republic the game hit the charts and became best selling game on some prominent online retailers.

not soon after that, gamers from outside europe started complaining about the game being available, but not to them!

Many gamers tried to get the CZ or German version, and translated the game to english thanks to some ArmA enthousiasts at 6thsense.

it didnt take long before the game was available everywhere in the world, thanks to the community.

Despite its predecessor, ArmedAssault doesnt seem to have 'much' active players for a title of this caliber.

is this the result of the release schedule? the quality of the game, or its content?

With the main 505 release in sight, BIS promised some new goodies in the game and furthermore, the editing tools will be released.

will this boost the playernumbers on Armed Assault?

the lack of a worldwide release, presses the player numbers but not the creativity of some players.

furthermore, the 'ColdWar rearmed' project promised a lot of nice new 'old' content

As the current amount of addons/missions for Arma is quite much for a game thats just on the market for a few months, i forsee a nice future of Armed Assault.

many players that tried Armed Assault, as a replacement for another FPS, will have to learn to love the game, where others will hate it at first sight.

But still, im astounded of the amount of almost empty servers, although i think that in the end, the always innovating community behind ArmedAssault will make the game a success, as they already proved in this short time.

i think it's only just begun....

ArmAGraph http://abe.armamods.net/test/armagraph.php

regards,

Jerry Hopper

Sahrani Radio : http://sahrani.armamods.net

ArmA Banner Exchange : http://abe.armamods.net

(note: excuse my spelling - im not native english)

(note2: the ArmaGraph images are periodicly updated, and free for reuseage )

[sickboy 13]

Very cool overviews, nice we have an 'onsite reporter'

Most ppl are probably waiting for fixes especially for the MP sound bugs, and AI behaviours etc. etc

[deanosbeano 0]

Very nice info,

My own belief for lack of players is 3 fold

1 the campaign hasnt sparked any big wave of pr

2 as already said by Bis the first reeases was a little early for the masses

3 its hard to convince people tht after 5 years of ofp arma offers

more than t72 v m1a1 or ak47 v m16 east v west etc.

my own opinion, i already spent 100`s of hours playing with the engine and i love it. as for the game i havent played more than 5 mins,i will wait for the Blood sweat and tears of 505 version.

[redface 1]

do the charts only count MP players?

because you cannot fully measure this engine's fanbase by its MP enthusiasts.

Being an SP enthusiast mainly, I've been playing OFP for 5 consecutive years, but I stopped playing MP a long time ago.

[jerryhopper 286]

do the charts only count MP players?

because you cannot fully measure this engine's fanbase by its MP enthusiasts.

Being an SP enthusiast mainly, I've been playing OFP for 5 consecutive years, but I stopped playing MP a long time ago.

yes, these numbers are from ONLINE servers only.

imho, i dont see a point in playing SP.

anyways, im working on more numbers and some mission/mod statistics.

[sluggCDN 0]

I believe, as many stated already, that ArmA's poor optimization and performance issues is what stops most of the ppl from visiting and playing on the servers. The experience at times is utterly frustrating. I'd imagine after a few hours of agonizing over the slideshow or crashing-to-desktop ppl simply decide to wait till the solution arrives later. It's kinda the reverse snowball effect. If there are highly populated servers ppl flock to them; if there are empty servers ppl avoid them; 50 ppl may visit ArmA MP lobby just to see the list of empty servers - result: they turn around and leave. I personally don't like roaming 5 sq.km of empty virtual space by myself. I can do it off-line. I bet the same is true for any other average MP weekend warrior. So unless there are stable servers full of ppl ArmA MP situation will remain the same.

[Bunks 0]

So much for all those fanboys who sat here week after week flaming those who didn't like the game. Guess that so called minority of whiners where the majority after all. With all the flaming that went on here, I wouldn't be surprised if half of them never come back to the sight to even find out if things get fixed and improved.

So I raise my middle finger to all of you who chased away those people who were only posting their frustrations over a game they loved. And you know who you are. Now if you can spend some of that energy you did flaming them and put it into getting the word out when the fixes do come, maybe you won't burn in gamers hell (Eternal BSOD) if you do.

Personally, I think the game is great but with major issues, and I can't seem to find the motivation to play all that much. I even started playing OFP more than Arma in the last month. So I hope they make some drastic changes as well as fix many of the bugs, otherwise these numbers wont see much of a spike IMO.

[jerryhopper 286]

i guess your right bunks... for the last part..

although i cant imagine BIS is doing nothing.

meanwhile, ill add pointers in the timeline when a patch is released.

Meanwhile i got my hopes on 505/1.4 Release.  

[Sc@tterbrain 0]

Very nice info,

My own belief for lack of players is 3 fold

1 the campaign hasnt sparked any big wave of pr

2 as already said by Bis the first reeases was a little early for the masses

3 its hard to convince people tht after 5 years of ofp arma offers

more than t72 v m1a1 or ak47 v m16 east v west etc.

my own opinion, i already spent 100`s of hours playing with the engine and i love it. as for the game i havent played more than 5 mins,i will wait for the Blood sweat and tears of 505 version.

4. Unless previously exposed to OFP, most know NOTHING about Armed Assault or have even heard of it.  

-There is no release date listed on commonly used English game sites (gamespy for example).  

-US stores are not taking pre-orders and have no expected release date...or any listing of a game called Armed Assault.

-Many of those I played OFP with have adopted a "wait and see" stance on buying it.

So it looks like it will have to win over the public purely on its merrits.  Not saying thats a bad thing, there is plenty of media blitz on garbage.  

Heres to hoping the money I spent to be a beta tester went to good use.

[Jack-UK 0]

Very nice info,

My own belief for lack of players is 3 fold

1 the campaign hasnt sparked any big wave of pr

2 as already said by Bis the first reeases was a little early for the masses

3 its hard to convince people tht after 5 years of ofp arma offers

more than t72 v m1a1 or ak47 v m16 east v west etc.

my own opinion, i already spent 100`s of hours playing with the engine and i love it. as for the game i havent played more than 5 mins,i will wait for the Blood sweat and tears of 505 version.

4. Unless previously exposed to OFP, most know NOTHING about Armed Assault or have even heard of it.  

-There is no release date listed on commonly used English game sites (gamespy for example).  

-US stores are not taking pre-orders and have no expected release date...or any listing of a game called Armed Assault.

-Many of those I played OFP with have adopted a "wait and see" stance on buying it.

So it looks like it will have to win over the public purely on its merrits.  Not saying thats a bad thing, there is plenty of media blitz on garbage.  

Heres to hoping the money I spent to be a beta tester went to good use.

Agreed,

i spoke to two different clans i knew... around 200 people in total i guess...

ONE had played ofp... and he hadnt even heard of ArmA...

I know that BIS is a small company, but really you gotta find some cash for advertising this game! The demo doesnt really do it justice if im honest.

Great graphs mate, interesting read

[paragraphic l 2]

At the moment there are 2 people using 1.04 online, looks promesing

Nice "tool" to use verry usefull for seeing if ArmA is growing or not

[=jps=sgtrock 4]

Have you gathered data for a while? If so, any chance of seeing graphs of usage over time as opposed to a single day?

TIA

[jerryhopper 286]

Have you gathered data for a while?  If so, any chance of seeing graphs of usage over time as opposed to a single day?

TIA

yes, but this thing runs since 1 february.... not much history data yet.

[4 IN 1 0]

infact playing MP will get you some better performance then SP, as most of the AI/ script stuff are being handle by server itself, what really need is to iron out most of the CTD bugs as well as server code inorder to handle huge amount of data(multi core support for server side, etc)

[raedor 8]

So I raise my middle finger to all of you who chased away those people who were only posting their frustrations over a game they loved. And you know who you are. Now if you can spend some of that energy you did flaming them and put it into getting the word out when the fixes do come, maybe you won't burn in gamers hell (Eternal BSOD) if you do.

Bunks, +1WL for flaming.

[=jps=sgtrock 4]

I took a look at your graphs again this morning. They're beginning to look a little busy. I was wondering if you have ever heard of an open source application called Cacti? It's a package that provides a really nice front end to Round Robin Data tool (RRDtool), which in turn is an offshoot of the Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG). I've used Cacti several times in the past for system monitoring tasks and I've been very satisfied with it.

RRDtool is a really handy little beast for displaying all kinds of time based numerical data graphically. It does automatic data roll up, so you get a set of automatically generated graphs for the last day, week, month, and year. I think you can also set up graphs to go from the beginning to whenever by tweaking the data roll up functions.

The really good news is that someone already did all the heavy lifting to get good looking output for monitoring gamservers. With any luck you should be able to just adapt your existing data gathering program(s) to format it in a way that Cacti will suck it in and you're off and running.

Check it out! I think you'll be pleased by what you see.

[jerryhopper 286]

i know rrd, unfortunatly not compiled in php where i host.

so, to present at least something graphical, i used this.

But,the use of RRD is surely a point to look at for the future!

thanks for the heads up!

[R0adki11 3949]

I am sure once 505 version is released we shall see activity increase especially the many clans out there waiting for it, and we shall see all the old OFP MP ladders popping back and opening for business again.

[=jps=sgtrock 4]

i know rrd, unfortunatly not compiled in php where i host.

so, to present at least something graphical, i used this.

Actually, RRDtool is a separate module, not a part of PHP itself. It might be worth an e-mail to your Web host to see if they'd be willing to include it as an option.

[LT.INSTG8R 0]

I am pretty much in the same feeling as the rest that have spoken up.

I bought the German version the moment I found it. I was instantly hooked on the looks, feel and gameplay(I never got into OFP I was from the R6, SWAT, Ghost Recon and more recently RO "tac" games)Of course I knew of OFP but just never picked it up.

Now the Rig in my Sig of course has no issues playing anything else I throw at it at Max Res and settings as high as I want them( I mostly fly IL-2 with all the addons, and race in GTL and GTR2, again all running at forced 8xAA and 16XAF with nothing close to a "minimal" fps so I am basically Avg 55's)

So ArmA I KNEW was gonna be a nice "stress test"., Well imagine to my horror firing up the game for the first time on all default settings across the board to see 20fps?!, okay dont panic Crossfire is fussy lets tweak a little, well lets say a patch, a few weeks of waiting for a new ATI driver to see if they were a culprit(they are partially to blame but I also submitted a Feedback Ticket to the Catalyst Team to specifically address the Crossfire issues)and then more tweaking.

Well after all that and having settled on pretty much all Normal(not complaining or looking to get Very Highs across the board)but I do like the effect of post on High so I take hit there so I run less AA and AF(all in game set of course) and I end up with basically a game that tops out in the 40s and well, can bottom out in the teens at some points.

Yes yes we could talk about settings all day , I know my rig well enough to make it run well, but bottom line:

This game has been shelved until the next patch on the hopes of better performance and stability. I am not upset, sure Im anxiously awaiting the next patch, but I knew getting into this game it would be a long birthing process and tho I miss playing it I have my IL-2 46 that was just released in Dec to keep me well and truly occupied until this game is truly "born".

Like OFP this will be here for me to pick up for years to come, but the sooner the better as this game "can" basically become the only thing I will want to play as the endless possibilities for Combat scenarios and my love for Mission Building(make alot of Co-op missions in IL-2)means this game can replace my entire "Combat Game" Library(okay you will have to pry my IL-2 from my cold dead hands but the only guns I truly wanna pick up are in ArmA)

[blackdog~ 0]

ArmA looks like it needs some of those fancy spam email enlargement pills 'cos at this point things aren't looking good... the graphs just go down, down, down...

I think it's pretty safe to say that after the UK release there will be a great increase in the number of people playing MP...

... however, I think that we will see the same decline as seen in the above graphs...

sad......

[max power 21]

What decline? From the 5th to the 12th, the full version seems to have a pretty steady population with a slight rise in players on the 12th, and the demo seems to be fairly consistent. Were the numbers different on the 1st of Feb when this was posted?

[Dwarden 1125]

add monthly graph too

[.kju 3245]

and an all time graph

[jerryhopper 286]

i am working on a new version of the grapher!

stay tuned!