Yes this is a major issue people think unturned has 10x players then it actually does. First reason is people start hosting for unturned expecting these many players. Second reason is that YouTubers make videos and think they are making content for super popular game with a thriving community. Third reason this is pure false information I and many other people would like to know the real stats of unturned. Also you can’t even tell if the game is dying if the stats are fake. So when people argue that unturned is a alive game they base it off this 50k players when unturned prob has 8k players max.
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There is almost more servers than server players. But I think you meant to say players.
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I mean servers with an active playerbase.
Hosting servers for a nonexistent playerbase would be an issue, but I don’t think the YouTuber part would necessarily be a bad thing. More videos would potentially mean you can bring people back if those channels don’t mind taking a risk on unpopular videos.
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Does the server count and the server player count include the servers that aren’t publicly hosted, but rather privately among friends? If not, then I’d assume that’s where quite a lot of people are, since many people, myself included, play in such servers. I find it very unlikely that the amount of people who play on public servers are all there is to it, given that Unturned (initial steam release being around 2014) still gets quite a few reviews on the steam page: 3,2k recent reviews compared to 522k total reviews. For reference;
Rust (initial release date being 2013) has 8,7k recent reviews compared to 787k total reviews, and it has double the playerbase of Unturned right now, not being free to play.
ARK: Survival Evolved (initial release date being 2015) has 3,9k recent reviews, with 495k total reviews to show for, once again not being free to play. And it has a similarly active playerbase to Unturned.
So I find it pretty unlikely that the amount of players in public servers are all there is to it, the comparison I’ve made may seem unfair given Unturned is a free to play game, but I’ve always thought that free to play games tend to get reviewed less by people that play it, whether it may be because of inactivated accounts, or because it’s simply free to play and you’re not really paying any money for it.
Of course there’s no denying that the player count is probably higher than it actually is in some way or form, but I do not think it’s that high to be a major problem
When I am home I will look into the review thing later. but I do think it counts servers that are not public or with a password because they to are shown in the server list unless it’s a lan server which I don’t think many people use.
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It is baffling as to why anyone would idle Unturned at this point. Personally, I suspect CS:GO and TF2’s player counts are significantly inflated by idling as well, and I think that might be part of why TF2 is lower priority for Valve. I don’t think idling is a high priority for Valve, and if I did contact Valve asking about this I wouldn’t expect them to make it a priority - Unturned is small potatoes for Steam - you have to scroll down pages and pages before finding it in the top sellers list. I’ve asked them about things that would actually benefit Unturned players in the past like inspecting items in-game, preventing duplicates in mystery boxes, and guaranteed mythical drop rates, but without a response.
I’ve been keeping my own records of the server list for the past ~10 months or so and it does line up with Battlemetrics. Maybe I can see about making a tool to export a csv of the stats.
These are the most subscribed mods which are mainly ran by servers.
Note that the Most Subscribed tab is somewhat unhelpful because the top items were automatically subscribed for all players, and the slightly lower ones are much older files subscribed to by players that have likely left the game (e.g. FIFFS Objects is ancient).
Seeing how consistent criticism is handled, there’s a chance that this thread could be shut down, so I wish you luck.
And yes, this thread certainly will get closed as soon as there is even a miniscule reason that could be used for it.
I’m not sure where this comes from, as I’m always open to constructive criticism. I know that some conspiracy-theory type threads have been closed in the past.
Molt’s comments are correct. And FWIW, no, I’m not botting Unturned to boost the player counts. If I wanted to artifically boost Unturned’s player counts I would have kept item drops and made them more valuable. Heck, I could have made a 0.001% chance of mythical playtime drops and got even more bots!
From SDG’s point of view it would have been a better business decision to keep playtime drops. The game reached 100k+ potentially players before steeply dropping after I removed them.
Anecdotally, a lot of emails I receive from younger players mention that they only played singleplayer for years. I’ve heard this repeated in interviews on the Unturned Podcast as well. My guess is it’s relatively common for players to enjoy playing with mods casually offline.
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On top of that, Unturned uses a skin economy that equates to a pseudo stock market and it puts heavy emphasis onto this while using lootboxes, a form of gambling which is so disliked, almost every major game has phased it out except for some things like the gacha genre of games, inclusive of products like Genshin Impact, and gacha games usually provide “pity rewards” for poor luck (it’s unknown if Unturned does).
When pairing this with an exaggerated playercount, Nelson may be actively profiting off of people gambling using incorrect market data. This reckless combination that SDG staff just made the mistake of acknowledging (while undertaking no corrective procedures) puts Nelson in a legal gray area, as they are relying on a misrepresented market to profit for their own sakes.
People are spending thousands, staring at player counts which can hint at a healthy playerbase that they can make money from using Nelson’s officially sanctioned systems and the faith people may be having in this could be leading them to lose huge amounts of money. This should not be ignored or understated.
Depending on the response SDG gives and other variables, I’d be interested in calling an MP to speak about online gambling and markets with the context of what we are discussing right here.
Sidenote; Criticism is not conspiracy and removing playtime drops which could help people save up for mythicals or allow them to do trades of cheap rare/epic items for tons of extremely low rarity items which people gathered up to then turn into the in-game crafting currency, scrap, to then produce valuable mythicals, sounds more like a profit driven decision rather than one out of a desire to combat idleness.
One just has more practicality and makes more sense than “idlers on singleplayer hurt the community so I removed playtime drops”
So where do you think these players are coming from?
Also does player count have have the exact same as server list or a little more? Because unique players might be the combined total amount of players who joined that day and if that’s so you should change the player number in the community page.
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This. I can’t remember the last time I played on a server that wasn’t privated. I just don’t enjoy online multiplayer in the game due to some people being rather annoying.
what corrective procedures do you suggest?
reread what nelson said; the only threads that have been closed in the past are conspiracy theory stuff i.e. not this thread
It’s mentioned/implied earlier, but that number is collected and reported by Steam. We cannot set that number (assuming you’re referring to this one below). Developers don’t set that value – it’s tracked by Steam.
EDIT: Wanted to say add that, unfortunately, it doesn’t appear the BattleMetrics has an up-to-date FAQ on how they collect their information. From my understanding, they can only accurately report information from servers registered to their services. Otherwise, they’re just querying servers for a more limited set of information.
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Ask them to fix it.
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There is no problem with your message, in fact I agree with what you said and could elaborate. I also agree that people should get some basic cosmetic drops, at least once a week, as people who play Unturned most likely than not, don’t have any money on cosmetics.
But with that said I gotta admit that I am happy for the drops being disabled. Why? Now we will have a healthier market with more realistic prices, as now supply does not outweigh demand massively (it does, yes, but it becomes better slowly), I am also happy for scrap trade ban, as there was a lot of people who tried profiting off mythical crafting and well, there still are, but now they have to bulk-buy low-tier skins and then spend a lot of time scrapping them, so they are at an inconvenience, which I like. I think we have to stick to no-drop policy for another year or so and the market will get better. We don’t want PAYDAY2 skin situation in here.
Will you guys look more into this? Or just let it be because it’s obviously fake stats.
This reminds me of a youtube video I watched uploaded by Casperr in which he investigates why TF2’S steam chart player numbers are drastically different to what other websites report, check it out maybe some of what he said applies to Unturned’s situation. Anyway, I don’t think Nelson would get any response from Steam concerning their steamchart numbers since they probably employ a data collection method which is the same for all games on Steam, so this fake player number issue most probably plagues all games on steam. But that’s just my opinion and I’m no expert on the matter.
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Yee but when its 10X the real players is not normal at all.
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if you think it’s such a big deal write an email to steam about it
I am not the problem solver…
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This is very disappointing.
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Nelson can’t do anything about it, you should take action yourself if you want it to change.
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I think some of that count came from people that idling hours to get it in profile or selling that accounts to cheaters because many servers have required played time limit
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