obligatory:
https://steamcharts.com/app/359320
those are (at least somewhat) silly numbers. any source?
Sure, several ways to get approximately the same numbers using a combination of in-game and public 3rd-party information.
1) The Distant Worlds method
If you compare traffic levels through EDDN (3rd-party tools) and traffic levels report in-game at stations you can conclude that about 5-10% of player activity in the bubble is tracked by 3rd-party tools (EDDiscovery, ED Market Connector, etc).
We know from EDSM how many people set off on DW2 using 3rd-party tools to track their journey and got at least as far as the first few waypoints, and therefore weren't in the bubble, and we can see the (step) change in activity in the bubble when DW2 departed.
Approximately 1/6 of the EDDN-tracked player activity dropped out when DW2 left, and according to EDSM that's caused by 84% of 5380 people reaching the first waypoint, so that's about 27000 (weekly active) players using EDDN-feeding 3rd-party tools in total, which we know from the traffic report to be about 5-10% of all players, so that's 250k-500k total weekly active players.
DW2 was a while ago but what player activity metrics can be obtained have been broadly stable since, other than in the last few months where they've gone up a bit, so it probably hasn't changed massively.
2) The Squadrons method
We know from the squadron leaderboards that there are at least 12000 squadrons on PC with some activity in an 8-week 'season', and sampling squadron sizes gives an average players/squadron count of about 8 (lots of 2-player and 3-player squadrons offset by a small number of 100+-player squadrons that people might actually have heard of)
12000*8 is about 100,000 players.
Looking at similar figures from XBox/PS4 about 75% of players in squadrons seem to be on PC.
So that's about 133,000 players in squadrons, a substantial proportion of which must be somewhat active or the squadrons wouldn't show up on the leaderboard at all (if a squadron has only 2 or 3 members, one of them must have done something).
Hang around in Open, see what proportion of players have a squadron tag. At least the ones I see, most players aren't in a squadron. Solo players are probably less likely than Open players to be in a squadron, too.
Getting a decent sample is tricky, but still, somewhere over 200k seems very plausible here based on maybe 1:3 people being in a squadron in Open.
3) The Steam Stats method
Steam stats give about 12,000 daily peak
concurrent players at the moment, at around 2000-2200 UTC.
If I check my friends list at that time of day and sort by 'active first', most of the first page is online, the next five pages have been online at some time in the last 24 hours, and the next six pages have been online at some time in the last week. (This proportion has been basically stable for years, though obviously individual players might take weeks off at a time)
So that suggests that around 1/12 of weekly active players is online at the peak time. 12,000 * 12 ~= 150k weekly active players on Steam
So ... how many players out of the total are on Steam? Obviously the 25% on consoles (estimted from the squadron boards) aren't on Steam. So this gives 200k+ weekly active players, perhaps quite a bit more if there's a significant number of non-Steam PC players.
All three of these estimates are compatible with a weekly active number somewhere around 250k (and a monthly active number probably around twice that) so I tend to go for 250-500k as an estimate of "somewhat active"
as a seasoned procrastinator i can assure you that months flying by is not work. are you really wanting to say that the current carriers as implemented took "years of work"? dunno if that's just silly humor or actually intended as an insult
Given that prior to carriers "a station, but it can change state without a weekly server reset" was a concept widely laughed at with Thargsday and similar ... I'm not going to underestimate just how difficult it was to get stations to move (mostly) reliably to player-defined positions on 15 minutes notice and have most player clients agree most of the time on where they are.
The time taken to develop a feature and the actual bits the players see aren't necessarily related. The bit of code that stops two carriers coming out of hyperspace at the same location as each other and as an NPC station we'll never see, and if it took months to get right, that's months before they can release carriers because we'd really notice if it wasn't there. (The big remaining flaw in this code that drops carriers into the ambiguous zone near rings and sends them running away from their owners most certainly has been noticed...)
It was a couple of years and multiple delays before carriers were released, so I'm assuming it took them a couple of years of work.
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