Show me proof the vast minority of players are grouped?
I thought this would be easy, but it turns out that the
maximum possible size of all known PC squadrons combined is 18 million players, which is actually higher than the total confirmed player count of 13 million, so it's not actually completely provable without more effort than it's worth
Using estimates of how big squadrons actually are, since they're clearly not all at the 500 cap, gives an estimate of about 300,000 squadron members on PC.
This actually gets a bit more interesting - there are very few really large squadrons, but of course if you have one squadron of 500 and 500 solo players, still half the
players are in the big squadron.
So you get, roughly:
- a third of players
in squadrons at all are in a large one (100+ players)
- another third are in a medium-sized one (10-100 players)
- the remaining third are in a small one (1-10 players)
(with the modal squadron size being "2" and the second most-common being "1")
But of course that doesn't estimate what proportion of lone players haven't bothered creating a personal-use squadron. (To which the real answer is as usual "are you counting people who play for 50 hours and move on or not?" - if yes, then most certainly most players aren't in a group! - but can we do better than that to at least consider those who might be interested in Colonisation in the first place?)
Going back to the squadron leaderboards, those show that at least 10,000 squadron-affiliated players are active in any 8-week season (and this is of course a substantial underestimate, because it's only counting each of those 100+ squadrons as a single player, and they probably have at least two or three people active), with about half the total active in any given week.
On the other side, recent CGs (recent colonisation-related CGs, even) have had turnouts in the 10k-20k range.
Estimates of the number of
active Powerplay-affiliated players come in at about 10k/week too; Inara then estimates slightly under half of players are pledged.
There are around 12,000 pending claims detected via EDDN, which will be an underestimate but sets a definite floor on the number of players interested in Colonisation
Still, based on all of that, if we're considering "forum-level" players - the sort who might be interested enough to take part in advanced features like CGs, Powerplay, Colonisation, etc. rather than basic features like "buying a D-rated FSD for their Freewinder" or "surviving long enough to reach a second system" - there's probably about 20-30,000 active at any time, and probably about half of them are in a "medium" squadron or larger.
Linking that back to the commodity requirements to establish a system...
| Initial station tier | Commodities (incl. "first station" tax) | Single top 50% CG player | Single top 25% CG player | Single top 10% CG player | Single top 10 CG player | 5-person squadron | 25-person squadron | 100-person squadron |
| 1 (outpost) | ~20k | No | 3-4 weeks | 1 week | <1 day | 1 week | 1 day | several per day |
| 2 (coriolis) | ~70k | No | No | 3-4 weeks | 2-4 days | 4 weeks | a few days | 1 day |
| 3 (orbis) | ~250k | No | No | No | 1-2 weeks | No | 2 weeks | a few days |
Using the CG mean as the average hauling rate for a squadron member here.
One major thing to note here is that there isn't a clean distinction between a "solo" feature and a "group" feature anyway. The top individual player can haul faster than an
average 25-person squadron can (and with 25 people, on average they'll almost always be average). A top 10% CG player (of which there are over a thousand) can haul faster than most small groups.
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