Wow, that's actually really good. I'm wondering how much of that is due to DW2 influencing a lot of people to submit to EDSM that might not have otherwise.
Tracking exploration activity
- Thread starter marx
- Start date
Wow, that's actually really good. I'm wondering how much of that is due to DW2 influencing a lot of people to submit to EDSM that might not have otherwise.
Good question. Let's see... EDSM traffic report videos used to have a Commander count from 3304-01-01 to 3305-05-31, which was the last one uploaded. I transcribed the Commander counts at the beginning of each month (I'll share this as part of a bigger compilation soon-ish), and 3304 December to 3305 January and then to February both saw many more registrations than previous months. +3,800 and +3,100 Commanders, while usually it was around a +1,000-1,500 range. (The exception being 3304 February, with +2,500 Commanders - it was Beyond Chapter One.)
For reference, DW2 had 5,380 players registered on EDSM. No idea how many of them joined it for the expedition, of course. 2,628 of them finished, but that was half a month after the last traffic report.
Also, at the end of the traffic reports, 3305-05-31, the number given was 50,868 Commanders.
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Please continue being my favourite stats nerd, Marx.
Couldn't have said it better
Thanks! So now is the perfect time to talk about a mistake I made 
As I'm working on a one-year summary of various statistics, I noticed that my estimates for EDSM sales were seriously off (less than half) on the Squadron leaderboards sheet, so I removed them. I'll rework that part sometime later.
Until then, a comparison. Squadrons over the year produced an estimated 6.6 trillion Cr (6.6E+12), with the top 10 producing 1.7 trillion Cr there. (That's an exact value, not an estimate.) In the same span of time, EDSM's new uploads of ELWs, WWTCs, WWs and AWs produced an estimated 3.3 trillion Cr. (The estimate here comes from me calculating them for median sizes, and not calculating the exact payout value of each and every body.)
If I were to include HMCPTCs (and RTCs) in there, that would likely be much higher, as they are quite numerous. (The entire data currently has 3.2 million HMCPTCs versus 1 million WWTCs. 0.58 million of those WWTCs were added this past year, however.) I'll have to look into that later.
But for now, with these numbers, the uploads from EDSM are roughly twice the value of the top 10 squadrons, and half that of the estimate for the top 1000 squadrons. (By #1000, we're talking about squadrons that sell less than 100-120 million Cr of data in two months.) Of course, how many players (and more specifically, explorers) might be in and outside squadrons is anyone's guess, but it's interesting nonetheless.
As I'm working on a one-year summary of various statistics, I noticed that my estimates for EDSM sales were seriously off (less than half) on the Squadron leaderboards sheet, so I removed them. I'll rework that part sometime later.Until then, a comparison. Squadrons over the year produced an estimated 6.6 trillion Cr (6.6E+12), with the top 10 producing 1.7 trillion Cr there. (That's an exact value, not an estimate.) In the same span of time, EDSM's new uploads of ELWs, WWTCs, WWs and AWs produced an estimated 3.3 trillion Cr. (The estimate here comes from me calculating them for median sizes, and not calculating the exact payout value of each and every body.)
If I were to include HMCPTCs (and RTCs) in there, that would likely be much higher, as they are quite numerous. (The entire data currently has 3.2 million HMCPTCs versus 1 million WWTCs. 0.58 million of those WWTCs were added this past year, however.) I'll have to look into that later.
But for now, with these numbers, the uploads from EDSM are roughly twice the value of the top 10 squadrons, and half that of the estimate for the top 1000 squadrons. (By #1000, we're talking about squadrons that sell less than 100-120 million Cr of data in two months.) Of course, how many players (and more specifically, explorers) might be in and outside squadrons is anyone's guess, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Okay, thanks to @Orvidius now making huge dumps (of planets) for us all, I went and redid the EDSM payout estimates, for three possible scenarios:
1. Pessimistic: nothing is mapped (obviously not going to happen, but this is as low as it can go): 1.66 trillion Cr
2. Likely: my made-up values for how many bodies Commanders might map (ELWs are much more likely than RTCs, for example): 4.15 trillion Cr
3. Optimistic: everything is mapped (obviously not going to happen, but this is as high as it can go): 7.64 trillion Cr
The big difference between Likely and Optimistic comes from all the HMCPTCs.
Will share these too later, so everyone can play around with the values and see what comes out for the likely one.
1. Pessimistic: nothing is mapped (obviously not going to happen, but this is as low as it can go): 1.66 trillion Cr
2. Likely: my made-up values for how many bodies Commanders might map (ELWs are much more likely than RTCs, for example): 4.15 trillion Cr
3. Optimistic: everything is mapped (obviously not going to happen, but this is as high as it can go): 7.64 trillion Cr
The big difference between Likely and Optimistic comes from all the HMCPTCs.
Will share these too later, so everyone can play around with the values and see what comes out for the likely one.
An interesting bit before the updates to come soon. In the anniversary statistics referenced above, there was also a part about players having creaded 20,919 squadrons: with that in mind, I went back to the squadron leaderboard to see just how the situation might look below #1,000. I planned to take a sample every thousand squadrons all the way down, but by #10,000, the amount was so vanishingly small that I stopped.
Turns out that the #1,000-#10,000 range fits an exponential curve wonderfully, and in total, it would account for a bit under 19 billion points. So the #1-#1,000 estimated total is 95% of the #1-#10,000 estimated total. Since this isn't a big difference, and it's rather annoying to get the data from the game over that long a range, I'll keep sampling to #1,000 only.
In case anyone's interested, here's the data for the previous PC season, with rank and exploration points (2 Cr data sale = 1 point):
Turns out that the #1,000-#10,000 range fits an exponential curve wonderfully, and in total, it would account for a bit under 19 billion points. So the #1-#1,000 estimated total is 95% of the #1-#10,000 estimated total. Since this isn't a big difference, and it's rather annoying to get the data from the game over that long a range, I'll keep sampling to #1,000 only.
In case anyone's interested, here's the data for the previous PC season, with rank and exploration points (2 Cr data sale = 1 point):
| #1,000 | 47,720,804 |
| #2,000 | 14,409,462 |
| #3,000 | 5,810,967 |
| #4,000 | 2,763,482 |
| #5,000 | 1,527,893 |
| #6,000 | 828,679 |
| #7,000 | 435,261 |
| #8,000 | 209,450 |
| #9,000 | 88,231 |
| #10,000 | 19,044 |
Another month has passed, and the same remarkable stagnation in exploration activity continues, reaching half a year now. I mean, while there have been some differences, but they'd make up a day or two's worth of new systems only. Even with the decrease after the negative announcement in October, activity has held much more steady than it has in earlier times. I guess that's good because it doesn't go lower, but it's also bad because it used to be higher.
This is for new systems, that is. For the rest, such as bodies scanned per system, it's slowly but steadily heading lower since the start of October. But even there, the decreases are not much. What is really quite curious instead is both how new stars per systems is steadily dropping, and how much it can fluctuate on a daily level. We are talking about auto-scanned stars, after all.
Anyway, on to something more interesting: the holiday free login bonus. If you take a look over at the Steam charts, you'll notice that during December, there was a +47% increase in average players there. Any comparable increase in exploration activity? None whatsoever. I'd wager this goes to show that at best, it was only bubble activity that had increased - and at worst, the player activity increase was mostly just logging in to grab the free Arx. But in any case, this is a nice example of how exploration activity can be different from overall player activity, with the two not moving together. (Another example: DW2.)
But hey, we'll see in a month or two if maybe there actually will be an increase in exploration activity too, due to a possible influx in new players.
This is for new systems, that is. For the rest, such as bodies scanned per system, it's slowly but steadily heading lower since the start of October. But even there, the decreases are not much. What is really quite curious instead is both how new stars per systems is steadily dropping, and how much it can fluctuate on a daily level. We are talking about auto-scanned stars, after all.
Anyway, on to something more interesting: the holiday free login bonus. If you take a look over at the Steam charts, you'll notice that during December, there was a +47% increase in average players there. Any comparable increase in exploration activity? None whatsoever. I'd wager this goes to show that at best, it was only bubble activity that had increased - and at worst, the player activity increase was mostly just logging in to grab the free Arx. But in any case, this is a nice example of how exploration activity can be different from overall player activity, with the two not moving together. (Another example: DW2.)
But hey, we'll see in a month or two if maybe there actually will be an increase in exploration activity too, due to a possible influx in new players.
https://heatmap.sotl.org.uk/history will give you the same sort of proxy measure for bubble activity (hyperspace jumps to inhabited in-bubble systems, as recorded on EDDN)
My theory for why these measures don't appear to be much affected - positively or negatively - by any of the things which affect others is that EDSM/EDDN use is likely to be much higher among people who are already regular players, and therefore neither "doom" nor "free Arx" will affect them logging in as usual anyway. (To a lesser extent, the same is probably true of the squadron metrics)
So no increase in bubble jumping activity too then? Interesting. That probably leaves increased Steam counts from logging in for that free Arx.
Still, there's a good question then: if the levels of exploration activity (via new systems) aren't changing much these days, why were they changing much more noticeably before Chapter Four?
That leads me to an interesting idea... I could look up how many expeditions launched each month, and their number of participants. Later, how many finished. See if anything interesting will come out there. Probably not, but only one way to find out.
Time for the monthly update! Looks like I misread the end of December, and the holiday bargain bin sale did actually turn out to give a significant activity boost. I suppose it makes sense that an activity increase on EDSM would follow the sale and the holiday new player peaks by a few weeks: after all, it's not like registering on, and uploading to, EDSM is the first thing for new players to do. In any case, the sale started on 2019/12/19, and the new systems peaked on 2020/01/12. The monthly new systems almost got to 1.3 million, but by the end of the month, it went down to a +22.84% increase from the previous month. Compare with Steam charts: +46.98% in December, +8.43% in January.
It's also interesting to compare with the Colonia jump traffic history that Ian Doncaster shared: traffic there doesn't seem to have increased that much. All the new players not rushing to, and staying at, Colonia should be no surprise though.
For now, the upward trend might have peaked, but it's a bit soon to tell. We'll see if it did, and if it'll stabilize or slide off to the previous levels. It's worth noting though that the 2017 holidays saw a similar boost, except larger - almost +50% - which began decreasing soon after it peaked. Of course, Beyond Chapter One with its revamped engineering likely saw many Commanders returning to the bubble.
(As for 2018, December and January saw the launches of a major update and DW2, so everything aligned perfectly for a huge boost there.)
Now, some other interesting stuff. While looking for someone else, I came across some interesting information: way back on 2016/03/17, Michael Brookes said on a stream that 30,851,973 systems have been discovered to date, making up 0.0077% of the galaxy. So we have three data points from Frontier. I put them all into an "Official numbers" subsheet then.
This means that the period between 2016/03/17 and 2018/03/02 saw an average of 114,702 new systems discovered per day, while 2014/11/22 (the gamma headstart) to 2016/03/17 was 64,141, and 2018/03/02 to 2019/12/16 was 84,306.
In comparison, over the period of DW2, the daily average of new system uploads to EDSM was 64,584. From after DW2 to today, it's 35,444.
Coming soon: the squadron exploration leaderboard results for this season, which should be interesting as well. Unless there'll be a huge rush at the end (which is entirely possible), it looks like they'll be setting a new low.
It's also interesting to compare with the Colonia jump traffic history that Ian Doncaster shared: traffic there doesn't seem to have increased that much. All the new players not rushing to, and staying at, Colonia should be no surprise though.
For now, the upward trend might have peaked, but it's a bit soon to tell. We'll see if it did, and if it'll stabilize or slide off to the previous levels. It's worth noting though that the 2017 holidays saw a similar boost, except larger - almost +50% - which began decreasing soon after it peaked. Of course, Beyond Chapter One with its revamped engineering likely saw many Commanders returning to the bubble.
(As for 2018, December and January saw the launches of a major update and DW2, so everything aligned perfectly for a huge boost there.)
Now, some other interesting stuff. While looking for someone else, I came across some interesting information: way back on 2016/03/17, Michael Brookes said on a stream that 30,851,973 systems have been discovered to date, making up 0.0077% of the galaxy. So we have three data points from Frontier. I put them all into an "Official numbers" subsheet then.
This means that the period between 2016/03/17 and 2018/03/02 saw an average of 114,702 new systems discovered per day, while 2014/11/22 (the gamma headstart) to 2016/03/17 was 64,141, and 2018/03/02 to 2019/12/16 was 84,306.
In comparison, over the period of DW2, the daily average of new system uploads to EDSM was 64,584. From after DW2 to today, it's 35,444.
Coming soon: the squadron exploration leaderboard results for this season, which should be interesting as well. Unless there'll be a huge rush at the end (which is entirely possible), it looks like they'll be setting a new low.
As promised, here are the latest season's squadron leaderboards. Things took a bit of an unexpected turn there: while the overall performance of the top ten is lower than ever before, by a considerable difference, the lower ranks performed significantly better than they did earlier. Better enough that their gains would provide a combined total that's better than the previous season's, even if not by a whole lot. The end result is mostly a standard season, but perhaps squadrons are reshuffling a bit.
On another note, something interesting: last Sunday, February 2, saw a big spike in new systems uploaded. 71,514, an amount that hasn't been seen since DW2, well in excess of the usual Sunday spikes, which before the sale would only occasionally reach 50k, and went to 53-56k afterwards. So, what was this? Several squadrons doing a burst of activity before the end of the season perhaps? Nothing else really comes to my mind... but looking back at the previous seasons' end dates, there weren't any such similar spikes there.
Well, we'll see if this was a one-off occurence, or the start of something new.
On another note, something interesting: last Sunday, February 2, saw a big spike in new systems uploaded. 71,514, an amount that hasn't been seen since DW2, well in excess of the usual Sunday spikes, which before the sale would only occasionally reach 50k, and went to 53-56k afterwards. So, what was this? Several squadrons doing a burst of activity before the end of the season perhaps? Nothing else really comes to my mind... but looking back at the previous seasons' end dates, there weren't any such similar spikes there.
Well, we'll see if this was a one-off occurence, or the start of something new.
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I think the one I shared in this thread was the bubble traffic history - https://heatmap.sotl.org.uk/history . This is EDDN-derived, so I wouldn't expect new players to shift it very much (at least, not while they're still new: longer-term it might lead to a slow rising trend if they stick around) as they probably won't have installed the tools.
The Colonia traffic history - https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/history/trends - uses manual collection of traffic data from the local news report with EDDN just used for some interpolation between those points, so if any new players came out here it would pick them up.
(There has been a small rise in that recently, but that's more likely due to a combination of local political factors and the new BGS states giving people more to do)
Here's this month's update, with plenty of new interesting things. I've had an "experimental" version of the sheet for quite a while, featuring the daily data, with calculations and charts drawn from that. However, before February, nothing much of interest has appeared on there, so I didn't publish it. Now, in February, there has been an interesting increase in systems that's only visible on a daily chart and smoothed out on a monthly, so I planned to put all them in after the turn of the month. That time is now. (Then came what was a surprise to me: Orvidius also added two automatically rendered graphs to EDAstro, so that's pretty cool.)
You can find the data on the "Daily activity (Sy/St/Pl)" subsheet - I didn't include ELWs, AWs an expeditions from the monthly one), and more importantly, the charts on the "Charts - daily" subsheet. There's also a daily sum of the last 30 days' of data (sums in the case of systems, average in the cases of ratios), which smooths out the daily graphs, so to speak, and makes it easier to notice some trends on them. These were mostly visible on the monthly charts already, but there are many more data points this way of course.
One thing that isn't visible there is comparing the new systems uploaded to the new bodies / systems ratio. That appears to suggest that much of the time, when people discover more systems, they scan less bodies per system. Take a look at this:
(B/S is multiplied by an arbitrary 10000 to make it easier to see and compare.)
Notice that most of the time, when Systems - the blue line - increase, bodies per systems - the red line - goes down. Especially on the weekend spikes. It's not always the case, and I suspect new explorers might be responsible for this, as they are still starry-eyed and use the FSS more. You can also notice the day when the September update went live and the servers were offline for a longer time, as both graphs take a hit on that day.
On another matter, although the slow but steady decline of new Stars / Systems was visible on the monthly charts already, it's worth comparing the new daily one, especially the 30-day average, with those of Bodies / Systems. First, here are the stars:
As you can see, outside of when DW2 proceeded through the core, there have been only small increases.
Now, compare with planets:
There are bumps, there are bigger increases.
So, what might explain these? First off, new Bodies / Systems depends on how much explorers use the FSS, while new Stars / Systems doesn't: they are auto-scanned. Second, when there are more explorers in the more dense regions, they likely get more stars too. This would explain why DW2 had higher levels of stars, before it left the core. Third, explorers are probably re-treading ground more and more: after all, the majority of exploration traffic on EDSM are the Sol-Colonia, Colonia-Sgr A* and Sol-Sgr A* lines, in this order. If an explorer goes into a system that was already discovered before the FSS, but only had the main star scanned and uploaded, then they'll add one less star than if the system weren't uploaded before.
Fourth, it could also be that explorers are spending less time outside the core. It would be interesting to see this too, but unfortunately, the EDSM traffic report videos have been discontinued.
Oh, and an interesting thing to note, one that's not visible on the daily charts linked above, but was visible on the historic monthly charts: before the FSS, new Stars / Systems had a slow but mostly steady increase. Planets, much less so, but ELWs, much more so. I think it was mostly just explorers becoming more thorough on average. Then the FSS happened, and while Planets understandably shot up, ELWs took quite a blow. Meanwhile, AWs shot up as well, then dropped back to previous levels(!) as interest waned.
What else is there... oh yes, February! The interesting thing is although there was only a slight increase in February, on a daily level there was a big spike, and a new peak since DW2. After stagnating for over half a year, on Febr. 2 the weekend peak suddenly shot to 71k new systems, up from 52k the previous Sunday. The next Sunday saw a new post-DW2 record at 73k. Following that, activity has tapered off back to the previous levels of January. The question is: what happened at the beginning of February? The only thing that comes to my mind would be the start of the new squadron season, but activity there doesn't seem to have increased so far, and previous seasons didn't see such corresponding spikes. The game wasn't on sale either, and the big holiday sale has been quite a while.
Meanwhile, Steam charts showed a significant decrease in players (the gains over the holiday and sale are gone), so that can't be it either.
So, does anyone have any idea what else it might have been?
You can find the data on the "Daily activity (Sy/St/Pl)" subsheet - I didn't include ELWs, AWs an expeditions from the monthly one), and more importantly, the charts on the "Charts - daily" subsheet. There's also a daily sum of the last 30 days' of data (sums in the case of systems, average in the cases of ratios), which smooths out the daily graphs, so to speak, and makes it easier to notice some trends on them. These were mostly visible on the monthly charts already, but there are many more data points this way of course.
One thing that isn't visible there is comparing the new systems uploaded to the new bodies / systems ratio. That appears to suggest that much of the time, when people discover more systems, they scan less bodies per system. Take a look at this:
(B/S is multiplied by an arbitrary 10000 to make it easier to see and compare.)
Notice that most of the time, when Systems - the blue line - increase, bodies per systems - the red line - goes down. Especially on the weekend spikes. It's not always the case, and I suspect new explorers might be responsible for this, as they are still starry-eyed and use the FSS more. You can also notice the day when the September update went live and the servers were offline for a longer time, as both graphs take a hit on that day.
On another matter, although the slow but steady decline of new Stars / Systems was visible on the monthly charts already, it's worth comparing the new daily one, especially the 30-day average, with those of Bodies / Systems. First, here are the stars:
As you can see, outside of when DW2 proceeded through the core, there have been only small increases.
Now, compare with planets:
There are bumps, there are bigger increases.
So, what might explain these? First off, new Bodies / Systems depends on how much explorers use the FSS, while new Stars / Systems doesn't: they are auto-scanned. Second, when there are more explorers in the more dense regions, they likely get more stars too. This would explain why DW2 had higher levels of stars, before it left the core. Third, explorers are probably re-treading ground more and more: after all, the majority of exploration traffic on EDSM are the Sol-Colonia, Colonia-Sgr A* and Sol-Sgr A* lines, in this order. If an explorer goes into a system that was already discovered before the FSS, but only had the main star scanned and uploaded, then they'll add one less star than if the system weren't uploaded before.
Fourth, it could also be that explorers are spending less time outside the core. It would be interesting to see this too, but unfortunately, the EDSM traffic report videos have been discontinued.
Oh, and an interesting thing to note, one that's not visible on the daily charts linked above, but was visible on the historic monthly charts: before the FSS, new Stars / Systems had a slow but mostly steady increase. Planets, much less so, but ELWs, much more so. I think it was mostly just explorers becoming more thorough on average. Then the FSS happened, and while Planets understandably shot up, ELWs took quite a blow. Meanwhile, AWs shot up as well, then dropped back to previous levels(!) as interest waned.
What else is there... oh yes, February! The interesting thing is although there was only a slight increase in February, on a daily level there was a big spike, and a new peak since DW2. After stagnating for over half a year, on Febr. 2 the weekend peak suddenly shot to 71k new systems, up from 52k the previous Sunday. The next Sunday saw a new post-DW2 record at 73k. Following that, activity has tapered off back to the previous levels of January. The question is: what happened at the beginning of February? The only thing that comes to my mind would be the start of the new squadron season, but activity there doesn't seem to have increased so far, and previous seasons didn't see such corresponding spikes. The game wasn't on sale either, and the big holiday sale has been quite a while.
Meanwhile, Steam charts showed a significant decrease in players (the gains over the holiday and sale are gone), so that can't be it either.
So, does anyone have any idea what else it might have been?
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Here's this month's update, with plenty of new interesting things. I've had an "experimental" version of the sheet for quite a while, featuring the daily data, with calculations and charts drawn from that. However, before February, nothing much of interest has appeared on there, so I didn't publish it. Now, in February, there has been an interesting increase in systems that's only visible on a daily chart and smoothed out on a monthly, so I planned to put all them in after the turn of the month. That time is now. (Then came what was a surprise to me: Orvidius also added two automatically rendered graphs to EDAstro, so that's pretty cool.)
You can find the data on the "Daily activity (Sy/St/Pl)" subsheet - I didn't include ELWs, AWs an expeditions from the monthly one), and more importantly, the charts on the "Charts - daily" subsheet. There's also a daily sum of the last 30 days' of data (sums in the case of systems, average in the cases of ratios), which smooths out the daily graphs, so to speak, and makes it easier to notice some trends on them. These were mostly visible on the monthly charts already, but there are many more data points this way of course.
One thing that isn't visible there is comparing the new systems uploaded to the new bodies / systems ratio. That appears to suggest that much of the time, when people discover more systems, they scan less bodies per system. Take a look at this:
(B/S is multiplied by an arbitrary 10000 to make it easier to see and compare.)
Notice that most of the time, when Systems - the blue line - increase, bodies per systems - the red line - goes down. Especially on the weekend spikes. It's not always the case, and I suspect new explorers might be responsible for this, as they are still starry-eyed and use the FSS more. You can also notice the day when the September update went live and the servers were offline for a longer time, as both graphs take a hit on that day.
On another matter, although the slow but steady decline of new Stars / Systems was visible on the monthly charts already, it's worth comparing the new daily one, especially the 30-day average, with those of Bodies / Systems. First, here are the stars:
As you can see, outside of when DW2 proceeded through the core, there have been only small increases.
Now, compare with planets:
There are bumps, there are bigger increases.
So, what might explain these? First off, new Bodies / Systems depends on how much explorers use the FSS, while new Stars / Systems doesn't: they are auto-scanned. Second, when there are more explorers in the more dense regions, they likely get more stars too. This would explain why DW2 had higher levels of stars, before it left the core. Third, explorers are probably re-treading ground more and more: after all, the majority of exploration traffic on EDSM are the Sol-Colonia, Colonia-Sgr A* and Sol-Sgr A* lines, in this order. If an explorer goes into a system that was already discovered before the FSS, but only had the main star scanned and uploaded, then they'll add one less star than if the system weren't uploaded before.
Fourth, it could also be that explorers are spending less time outside the core. It would be interesting to see this too, but unfortunately, the EDSM traffic report videos have been discontinued.
Oh, and an interesting thing to note, one that's not visible on the daily charts linked above, but was visible on the historic monthly charts: before the FSS, new Stars / Systems had a slow but mostly steady increase. Planets, much less so, but ELWs, much more so. I think it was mostly just explorers becoming more thorough on average. Then the FSS happened, and while Planets understandably shot up, ELWs took quite a blow. Meanwhile, AWs shot up as well, then dropped back to previous levels(!) as interest waned.
What else is there... oh yes, February! The interesting thing is although there was only a slight increase in February, on a daily level there was a big spike, and a new peak since DW2. After stagnating for over half a year, on Febr. 2 the weekend peak suddenly shot to 71k new systems, up from 52k the previous Sunday. The next Sunday saw a new post-DW2 record at 73k. Following that, activity has tapered off back to the previous levels of January. The question is: what happened at the beginning of February? The only thing that comes to my mind would be the start of the new squadron season, but activity there doesn't seem to have increased so far, and previous seasons didn't see such corresponding spikes. The game wasn't on sale either, and the big holiday sale has been quite a while.
Meanwhile, Steam charts showed a significant decrease in players (the gains over the holiday and sale are gone), so that can't be it either.
So, does anyone have any idea what else it might have been?
I finished my most recent Planetary SRV circumnavigation towards the end of January, and started my galactic circumnavigaion and have been running economical and scanning most planets?
I'd like to say it was me suddenly remembering that I haven't uploaded my exploration data in months, and uploading my alt's data as well, but I consider myself fortunate if I can scrape up three hours to play this game during a week. Given that my non-standard exploration style is about finding bodies to land on, as opposed maximizing my bodies/hour, I doubt that was it.
Hehe, you (plural) wish But hey, let's run with it and see where we'd end up, shall we? Suppose the two of you were responsible for the 20,000 extra systems discovered on that day. (Upload date doesn't count, it's the time of discovery that does.) So that means 10,000 systems between the two of you. With 86,400 seconds in the day, that means that if you no-lifed it for an entire day, you had to have spent 8.64 seconds per system. And that time would have to include the loading screen, the FSD re-charge, countdown and so on.
Talk about haxx!
But hey, let's run with it and see where we'd end up, shall we? Suppose the two of you were responsible for the 20,000 extra systems discovered on that day. (Upload date doesn't count, it's the time of discovery that does.) So that means 10,000 systems between the two of you. With 86,400 seconds in the day, that means that if you no-lifed it for an entire day, you had to have spent 8.64 seconds per system. And that time would have to include the loading screen, the FSD re-charge, countdown and so on.Talk about haxx!
Er. I don’t want to play “it was totally me” card... but...Yep, I'm sure it all comes down to you both. It's all your fault(s).
I did a huge upload at the beginning of Feb, when I joined IGAU. If EDSM dates reflect when data was uploaded rather than when it happened... I might be that a portion of that spike
