Season 28 is the first season since the Live/Legacy split. The main report is for Live PC only, but there's a bit of discussion of the Legacy PC boards at the end.
On each graph, points are on the Y-axis, and squadron position on the leaderboard is on the X-axis. Both scales are logarithmic. The light grey line (diamond marker) is the numbers for the previous measured season (in this case, 27). As in previous seasons, the approximate power-law distribution continues allowing estimates of total activity to be made without spending too long reading the boards.
(Political is excluded, because there are well-known exploits to allow very high scores, and because it's not clear even without the exploits what it's supposed to be measuring: the in-game description of "large and happy faction" is clearly wrong - possibly this will change if they ever implement BGS happiness properly)
Anti Xeno (310 pages)
Winners: AXI with ~4% of all points. Lavigny's Legion and Marauders Vanguard take the other trophies.
As predicted last time, this season being the first full season of the Thargoid War has given record AX scores, breaking an estimated 10 trillion for the first time. Total squadron count is down, but participation within all points of the top 1000 is up, especially at the top. Same three big AX squadrons in the same order as last time for the trophies.
Combat (865 pages)
Winners: AXI with ~1% of all points. Stellanebula Project and Marauders Vanguard take the other trophies.
Marauders Vanguard's AX work gets them their first combat trophy as well, with regulars getting Gold and Silver. The total number of squadrons is down slightly, but within the top 1000 this is near-enough a copy of last season.
CQC (27 pages)
Winners: We Rock You Roll with ~30% of all points. Nova Navy and Winged Hussars take the other trophies.
Nova Navy pick up their first CQC trophy, and Winged Hussars their first since season 13. As expected, the CQC board is pretty much dead - total activity is halved on last season's previous record low as serious bugs often make play impossible. For the first time, the total experience collected across all squadrons is not enough to get even a single Elite rank ... and only about 5% of the record highest season.
Apparently the map bugs are intended to be fixed in Update 15, but almost all of season 29 is going to come first, so this is likely to continue in disaster. Whether it recovers afterwards remains to be seen.
Exploration (889 pages)
Winners: Stellanebula Project with ~2% of all points. Intergalactic Astronomical Union and Society for Stellar Cartography take the other trophies.
Overall scores on much the same pattern as last time (without the elevation in the top two), and a new name as the Society for Stellar Cartography get a Bronze trophy. Total pages are about 10% down on season 27 - now that the display bug is being worked around, they can go down - but total activity levels are comparable.
Powerplay (32 pages)
Winners: Lavigny's Legion with ~14% of all points. Madmen of the Mojongo and Federal Liberal Command take the other trophies.
Powerplay, Powerplay never changes. For the third time in a row, the same top three (though the order has changed slightly) getting near enough the same amount of activity and pages.
The partial truce does seem to have been reflected in a 10-15% drop in total activity - though the need for individuals to maintain or obtain rank means that even if the activity has been directed to less confrontational actions, not much has necessarily been saved.
Trade (749 pages)
Winners: Pilots Booze Network Squadron with ~4% of all points. Stellanebula Project and Winged Hussars.
Trade activity is back up a bit on previous seasons, as Stellanebula Project get their first Trade trophy. As with the other big leaderboards, participation counts are down by about 150 pages, but the strengthening in the top 1000 means total activity is higher.
Other comments
A new record for AX and a new low for CQC were both pretty predictable (and predicted) at the start of the season. Total active squadrons are down somewhat, but this hasn't really affected total activity - the difference between a 7000th-placed squadron not logging in at all, or logging in once and doing a short trade run, is really not that big compared with the changes in activity patterns in the top 1000 squadrons (and a top 1000 squadron can very easily be a single active player)
Next season is likely to be all or almost all before Update 15: the 14-to-15 gap is a long one by previous standards - the obvious prediction would be for slight decreases on all boards, with the expectation that events might mean some show stability or even a slight increase instead.
Legacy Squadrons
The Legacy PC leaderboards are much smaller than their Live equivalents, but how much smaller does vary a bit. It's possible to estimate the activity on both and compare the two by sampling particular points and extrapolating the power-law approximation between them: the estimated ratio is the number of times more activity the Live board has compared with the Legacy one.
| Board | Live pages | Legacy pages | Estimated activity ratio |
| AX | 310 | 4 | 3,665 |
| Combat | 865 | 64 | 139 |
| CQC | 27 | 2 | 17 |
| Exploration | 889 | 67 | 111 |
| Powerplay | 32 | 2 | 78 |
| Trade | 749 | 56 | 128 |
(The page count ratio is rather smaller - generally around 14:1 except AX - which shouldn't be a surprise as a large squadron will appear on the report if a single one of its members logs into Legacy and carries out a scoring action)
This ratio - <1% of activity in Legacy - matches up pretty well with the version numbers received by EDDN and so is probably fairly representative of the number of PC players in each environment. Since it's quite time-consuming, I likely won't re-do this analysis for every report - probably not much will change.
As noted last season, in-game traffic reports (which are cross-platform) show Legacy with about 20% of total activity, and this hasn't changed much over the last 8 weeks - given the results above, this will be almost entirely XBox and PS4 players.
