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Zesty’s video is really great. Glad that a community outsider put in the investigative work for Unturned specifically, when he could have easily spent 5 seconds glossing over it.
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Mom said it’s my turn to post about this
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For the most part, Upper Echelons video points out many of the same things we saw and talked about in the previous forum post about this topic. He himself said he has no idea what is going on.
And while bringing the problem to the attention of a larger community may assist in recruiting people to get to the bottom of it, it also gives way for harmful speculations that do the existing (and very much real) portion of the community no good. For example, zman1064 made this comment on the video:
This actually gives a lot more merit to the unthinkable conspiracy (well unthinkable for Unturneds community) that Nelson (the games creator) is the one behind the botting.
And let us not forget that the botting idea also comes with its major flaws:
- Botting the game would require a lot of resources. It would cost a considerable amount of money to inflate the player count by 40,000+ players.
- Curated maps like Escalation (which just came out last week) already have 300,000 subscribers. I’m fairly certain that if the community only had 2,000 players that number would be much lower, but the map is auto-installed in most cases, so that may contribute to it.
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Additionally, since drops have been disabled since like 2022, people would have no reason to run that many bots. And if Nelson actually wanted to bot the game he could just re-enable free drops - and get others to bot the game at no cost to him.
Due to the combination of all that I personally think the bot theory is shaky at best and is pretty unlikely, and of course Zman is full of shit. Possibly the steam player count system is just flawed and that is why?
Nobody truly knows how the player count is really determined. So it could be that Steam/Valve is just gathering it incorrectly. But we also do have to keep in mind that Valve benefits a lot from having Unturned be a popular game. Valve likely makes decent amount of revenue from the stockpile, marketplace, and more.
That was a good point as well. I don’t think something like that could possibly be botted - large scale botting with running the game normally would be very resource intensive, and with tens of thousands of bots that would add up to be pretty expensive.
Due to that anybody who would bot the game would probably just spoof running the game or something, which would be far more viable, and would not auto subscribe to curated maps.
(Side note: anybody somehow botting the game by running many full instances of it would probably notice the free drops stopping and shut it off to not waste money)
Most bots would be run in text mode and I’m pretty sure the game would still auto install new releases
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The video covers the bot issue.
Curated maps like Escalation (which just came out last week) already have 300,000 subscribers.
My counterpoint is that games on Roblox like Decaying Winter only average around 1200-1600 players each day, yet they have 160k+ favorites and 32.7 million total visits.
Helldivers 2 is estimated to have sold at least 6 million copies, yet it only has 50,000 players as of now on Steam, less than Unturned!?
Unique players cycle in and out at a constant pace and the 2000 player theory people are placing for Unturned is both lower than the estimates given, 3k-4k, which shows that you haven’t paid attention to the video as you’re not even using the video’s numbers, but that aside, the above numbers serve to show that player counts can and do often correspond with numbers that large. + Bots may install new releases automatically.
Your points are recycled, were already addressed in the video and just exist to help placate long time fans of the game, who will believe anything which helps take their mind off of reality when the writing is on the wall.
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Okay??? Maybe I’m crazy but I didn’t see the video mention the fact that unturned doesn’t even have drops enabled anymore.
The Upper Echelon video does bring up the topic about the item drops being disabled, and he says that by disabling them it helps Unturned’s economy and keeps a stable revenue flow.
The main reason why I brought up the topic of the new curated map having so many subscribers is because it requires a lot of resources. Hell, running Unturned itself requires a lot of resources. Now, if you think like me (a plugin and module developer) you’d automatically realize that the best way to bot the game is to use the dedicated server client and simply change all references of the app ID to the regular game, which can be done much more easily using modules.
So what am I getting at with the dedicated server client that uses batchmode? The dedicated server client doesn’t automatically subscribe to workshop items. Alongside that, it doesn’t subscribe in general. That makes those subscriber counts more likely to be genuine.
Alongside that, even if the person(s) botting Unturned are not using U3DS, they would still not allow the game itself to run because it would result in too much resources being used. My automatic assumption is that they would prevent the game client from doing anything major, likely preventing it from running anything non-essential to being qualified as ‘online’, which would include auto subscribing to workshop mods.
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Ah okay that would make sense, I assumed people would try to spoof it somehow to not fully run the game but doing something like that would probably be easier.
Also, another hole in the bot theory is the fact that the player count drops and recovers drastically - if it’s bots that would mean whoever is running them shut them down and subsequently restarted all 50,000 despite drops being disabled and them not getting anything. Which… doesn’t really seem believable to me.
unique players is not the same as the amount of people currently playing the game:
looking at the graphs on battlemetrics they reveal that unique daily players are an order of magnitude bigger than the current player count, as different players get on and off of the game over the course of 24h.
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Fair enough, but it still helps to disprove Upper Echelon’s idea that the active community is only around 2,500 players.
You’re right, the player count is nowhere near as low as 2500. I’d wager it’s around 15-20k (using a similar method as the one from Zesty’s video)
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it still helps to disprove Upper Echelon’s idea that the active community is only around 2,500 players.
I disagree. In my eyes, it doesn’t.
You’ve not shown at all how average player-counts of 2-3k would not line up with Escalation’s subscription count. He also did not claim the active community is only 2,500 players. If you want to be good faith, don’t just be diplomatic, avoid misrepresenting people’s points.
In fact, you’ve not addressed the counterpoint relating to how similar products, even ones with smaller average playercounts, are also capable of having huge figures like 160,000 favorites, something which most people playing games on a platform like Roblox don’t do, despite the lower average. Which is simply explained by the reality that playercounts as low as 50,000 can still represent communities of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of players, as the playercount is not a measure of unique players and is just a measure of the amount of people actively playing a game that exact second.
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Still seems a bit high imo. Though I do think due to unturned being F2P it likely does gain and bleed a lot of one or two time players. I think 8k is maybe a more reasonable lower bound.
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Some huge updates can increase player count easily
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