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.