I had an entire ‘essay’ ready to post about many things such the range of issues with creating servers in unturned, the server list feeling not only empty but also clunky and the game in general feeling dead even though it is consistently top 20 in steam. But I don’t feel that it is worth posting so all I would like to say is:
Why does the game feel so dead?
I am a player from Australia so that may be an issue but there are maybe 3-4 servers that have consistent players, one of them being RP and most of the others being milked, monetized KitPvP. Can/will this ever be saved?
I don’t know how many servers would be in your area specifically although you should see all public servers anyway. Used to play on an Australian Paintball Arena server, was a fun time although latency wasn’t great from the US.
You can find the answer to your question in a recent forum post here:
You can further read into the discussion if you’re interested, but as you can see (and what Neson has concluded), a large part of the player base is just people playing offline.
Probably a good thing you didn’t write an entire essay, since the issue was discussed fairly recently, but do feel free to talk about why the server list feels ‘clunky’ and/or how to improve it.
Real Unturned player statistic is still somewhat of a mystery. Of course, looking at the Steam page, you can see a peak online of 50-60K players every day.
But these numbers are not visible on multiplayer servers.
In fact, no more than 10K will be collected there. And then the question is, where are the 40-50K remaining players? One might assume that these are Alt-accounts or bots that were created for getting In-game skins. But considering that Nelson long ago removed the possibility of skins dropping after played on multiplayer server, this theory makes no sense.
Also confirmed by the very activity of the community on Steam, with 50-60K players online, the community of any game with such online would be active, but it does not work with Unturned for some reason.
It really does look like the player count is being botted. Last time I checked, there were ~8000 people playing on some sort of a server, as per BattleMetrics data. And Steam counter showed 40-50k. Sure, a lot of people play this game in singleplayer, probably because server browser is a mess, even for me. It used to be more user-friendly. And some just like playing this game in singleplayer worlds. But there can’t be too many, can there? Some people do just idle the game, I have noticed. I knew like two dudes who probably never knew they can turn their computer off. One of them idled about 2000 hours in a single year and actually played like 200. Same year he managed to idle about 2-3k hours on some other free game aswell. But there can’t be too much people like that. As it was already said in a different discussion on this topic, player graph looks suspiciously static, it is very even and barely moves at all.
Small amount of people on this forum, lack of youtube views on Unturned videos and incredibly lackluster and passive trading community filled with greedy and toxic “traders”, who prey on gullible children that don’t know their items value says it all.
