I think it was Sandro that said a while ago that ‘a significant majority ‘ play in open, although it has to said that Elite is full of contradictions, and open mode is often played without seeing anyone else.List of most-played video games by player count - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Here is the thing, numbers matter and Elite never hit big player numbers as an MMO type game. We can speculate but i'd say the vast majority of the 12 million player base (of those that still play) mostly play it in Solo, and if that is true that is just the historic dna of Elite players expressing themselves in this latest Elite game. We grew up loving Elite as a grand PvE sandbox, that is a rich tradition that shaped many young lives growing up in the 80's and 90's, and most of us have played plenty of PvP type games to understand what we loved about Elite and what we don't enjoy about MMO's. It will vary from person to person, but i'd bet my hat that all through Elite: Dangerous' lifetime, most play in Solo most of the time. History matters.
Sampling between traffic reports and people actually seen in Open I considered ~50% of activity (!= players, of course) being in PC Open to be plausible pre-Odyssey in 2021 (now there's two PC Opens, of course).
Exactly how I did it. Slow and having a laugh, the system chat was hilarious (with the usual occasional exception) and as you say, the mad scramble for carriers when the announcements came out, with people being reminded to “tipmyour driver”.
It's a game
Back then we also had some fantastic hair-splitting threads about the exact meaning of "majority" too. Specifically, whether it has to mean more than 50% in the given context.Yes, they said that in 2018 - majority play in open but the people that engage in pvp are a minority
Now, how that majority was established it's also debatable.
40% open, 30% pg and 30% solo - means that a significant majority plays in Open?
Yes, in the scenario above, open has 33% more players than any of the other modes, and i'd say that 33% is significant indeed.
But it also means that pg+solo would vastly outnumber open
Anyway, those were 2018 numbers. Who knows what are the numbers now, except FDev ofcourse
That's from Steamcharts. It only covers the Steam version, not those that are directly on Frontier and on Epic.
Those look like the Steam stats, which are not actually "daily players" - Google has misled you, because it's not as smart as it pretends to be.
Yes, they said that in 2018 - majority play in open but the people that engage in pvp are a minority
Now, how that majority was established it's also debatable.
40% open, 30% pg and 30% solo - means that a significant majority plays in Open?
Yes, in the scenario above, open has 33% more players than any of the other modes, and i'd say that 33% is significant indeed.
But it also means that pg+solo would vastly outnumber open
Anyway, those were 2018 numbers. Who knows what are the numbers now, except FDev ofcourse
You need to learn to interprete your search results. Look at them and understand what they really mean.
Except you can't play you're own way, you're forced to play Frontiers way in order to progress only to find glass walls everywhere unless you want to perpetually take screenshots or repeat what you've done previously. If you like Frontiers way all is rosey, if you want to step outside that YMMV...
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