I believe it could be done fairly simply. Cut down shared gold to 20% and stop all level advancement (i.e. reapers level 50 to 51.) For any ship not Actually turning in loot. How can this game survive when half the player base is hiding in closed servers. No amount of PvP gimmicks will change that. Make alliances 2 ship max. That way more then one alliance in a server. (6 ships, 3 alliances possible would be a sweet spot I believe) you could still have a friendly ship on the seas for help, or adventure etc. The only reason RARE doesn't I'd bet the farm on is those alliance servers are pumping money in the Pirate Emporium, and keeping numbers falsely inflated. So, like a politician looking for votes, RARE looks the other and allows a part of the community to stay hidden and "protected" because it's financially viable to do so. When alliance server start hurting the bank account, and they can't look the other way anymore. Itll change or the will fizzle out. RAREs game, RAREs choice. What can ya do but be honest and put it out there. All they can do is lock your comment or not allow you post. You don't quite people up by taking their tongues and abilities to speak, you only prove your afraid of what theyre saying.
Wanna fix empty seas?
What does shared gold have anything to do with empty seas? Only 5 ships are allowed on a server which is insanely small number of players. So you are complaining about alliance discords which is maybe 5% of the active players in the game... Alliance servers have 0 impact on normal players experience. If you aren't seeing other ships on your server its probably because you're either on a glitched server by yourself and the game failed to merge you off the server for some reason or you are in an alliance yourself so it cant merge you. Servers only stay up for 24ish hours then no new ships can join. I have gotten bugged to where my ship never merged and I never saw another ship for like 7 hours. This has nothing to do with alliance servers or not enough players in my region it was just the game somehow bugged my ship to not merge so I got a single player sea of thieves experience, reminded me of the good old days when you could make this happen by just never dropping anchor since server merging only trigger when the ship was anchored. Man they should bring that back. Good times.
You are making a wild assumption that alliance discords are a much bigger problem than they really are. PvE servers have saved other games yet people like yourself seem to think true PvE servers would kill sea of thieves... They literally have no impact on you because if those discords didn't exist those players would have joined the MILLIONS of others who have quit over lack of proper PvE servers. Stop acting like there's less people out there for you to hunt because they don't like PvP when the reality is they wouldn't be around to hunt in either case. At least this way with them on alliance discords they are still buying micro transactions. I have seen plenty that literally buy everything put into the cash shop. Those whales wouldn't even be playing if it weren't for alliance discords.
@pumpa-cat said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
I’m curious. Where did you get the data to be able to state when half the player base is hiding in closed servers.?
Can you provide any links that show this?
It isn't public info
but what is known by players like me that have played and observed consistently for years is that the game in the organic environment has dwindled down to streamers and the active people in their communities and people that post in other social areas, which is why I see sot streamers nearly daily on the seas, and why they sea each other regularly.
The activity that is advertised never matches up with what long time players that play a lot see.
There is no reason that a few hundred people would randomly see each other over and over in a healthy adventure population. Randomly seeing someone someone knows once in a while is to be expected. Daily sightings is under no condition a positive activity sign, people seeing someone 3-5 times in one day is in no way a positive sign of activity in the organic environment. Season 7 and 8 make it much easier to notice. Season 7 has the books all over and ship names, season 8 has the pvp on demand which makes it very obvious.
It goes beyond a theory because of how many people create content in sot, content that clearly shows how often the same group are running into each other. Something that happened far less often a year and a half+ ago. It's something even some of their partners acknowledge on stream.
A couple of years ago I might see a known streamer once or twice a year, the last few seasons it's as often as daily sometimes and regularly weekly, while I play the same general way I always have, meaning adventure play where I sail around to see what happens.
Some try to dismiss it with "this many people are logged in" "this much activity happened". It's not showing in the organic environment.
@wolfmanbush said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@pumpa-cat said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
I’m curious. Where did you get the data to be able to state when half the player base is hiding in closed servers.?
Can you provide any links that show this?
It isn't public info
but what is known by players like me that have played and observed consistently for years is that the game in the organic environment has dwindled down to streamers and the active people in their communities and people that post in other social areas, which is why I see sot streamers nearly daily on the seas, and why they sea each other regularly.
The activity that is advertised never matches up with what long time players that play a lot see.
There is no reason that a few hundred people would randomly see each other over and over in a healthy adventure population.
It goes beyond a theory because of how many people create content in sot, content that clearly shows how often the same group are running into each other.
Part of the reason for this is a true lack of interest overall and so the active player base shrank, but also you get matched with people who are in the same region as you and a lot of streamers just fall into that category.
But also I have this suspicion they’ve been secretly testing MMR for the past few months on live servers and that’s why people are running into the same crews more often. I personally have never run into another crew twice, but I also don’t participate in PvP for the most part, and most of the people I’ve come across the last few months haven’t been interested either. Which makes me feel like if they were testing MMR they were inadvertently putting the passive people on servers together.
For forced alliance servers, the ones like Requiem, etc… at this time they run only 1 server per day each on average. Weekend might be 2, special events might be 3. On community day there are definitely more, but that’s 1 day every 3-4 months. But the people who play on these servers are mostly people who just wouldn’t play if these servers didn’t exist. So you aren’t actual removing them from the player pool because they’d just not play anyway.
Even so, that’s 5 ships and 15 pirates per server that are missing from the player base each. At one point in time not too long ago I tried to find as many of these forced alliance servers as possible, I found 16 that still had any activity, not all of them did it daily still. But with that math that’s still only 240 players removed from natural play on an average day. Definitely nowhere near half and nowhere near the problem people always go on as if it is. Natural alliances, I dunno about, can’t count them, can’t build statistic. But these forced ones like he mentions in another post Wastelandmafia, Requiem, etc… they aren’t the actual problem. And the fact people are willing to pay actual money to play on PvP free servers kinda points out what the actual problem is. You have people who love the game’s visuals and PvE content, but aren’t interest in naval battle for whatever reason. They would benefit from a PvE only game mode, but Rare specifically wants this to be PvEvP, so they will never get what they want, so they use the tools they are giving to be able to play a game they love in the way they wish to play it. Might not be what Rare intended, but if they couldn’t do this they just wouldn’t play the game at all.
That’s not to say I disagree with making a few changes to the way alliance works. I did always think 50% was a lot. I thought it was weird that all 4 ships got 50% and also the original ship lost nothing. It would make more sense if the % decreased depending on how many ships joined and that the OG ship lost a little off the top. I mean I think it would be fine too to just drop it to 20% instead of 50% and that be the only change. But that’s not going to stop people from using these alliance servers. Even if alliances got 0% they are still going to create these forced alliances because it’s PvP free.
At this point trying to restore the organic environment is more of a lost cause. People push the break up the alliance server thing because some of the popular streamers push for it
This game is what it has become, for some it's fine and for many it's not what they once were passionate about.
Grand wild adventure really isn't the game anymore, it's a small town fight club with pretty scenery now.
I don’t disagree. The game has lost a lot of the charm it once had. I used to get lost in it for hours every day, now I actually set sail maybe once a week. A lot of the reason behind that is lack of new content for people who have played for years. Season 7 was just “here, repeat all the stuff you already did as if you haven’t done it,” which for me just felt like a slap in the face. I took a break from playing until I could shift my mindset to being happy that I finally got the option to name my ship and that that’s all the season really netted me. But most of my friend group felt the same way, we all took a break from SoT after season 7 came out and have only recently started playing more actively again. The adventures actually kept us engaged, which I know people complain about the adventures, but it did its job keeping us old timers around through a lackluster(for us) season.
@abjectarity said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
I don’t disagree. The game has lost a lot of the charm it once had.
To me the charm always was the random players of the game. People that weren't connected to the sot network. They were characters. They had passion that wasn't connected to money or chats or clicks or likes around the game. They didn't deal in social currency. Entirely participating for the adventure, to be around other adventurers. They made this game what it was at its peak imo. It felt real in a way that is more difficult to find now imo. Much of the random adventure was replaced with contrived action.
That's why I stopped hanging out in open crew (even though I once loved the randomness of it), the randomness was dying off and it was streamer's chats going in there to look for things to take back to chat in a negative way. People looking to use people for content in some form, as a pawn.
IMO, problems multiplied with Ships of Fortune. A poorly designed risk/reward system was bound to lead to people utilizing more and more manufactured servers and less people playing organically.
The Reaper's Bones Emissary was intended to be the "risk" side of the coin...but prior to Season 8, it had pretty much just been reduced to PvE grinders serving as streamer/hopper bait.
For all the other trading companies, the "risk" side of the coin could easily be mitigated by checking the map/table for Reapers prior to setting sail and just hopping if there was any presence.
The whole map visibility element of the Emissary system was a bad idea through and through.
_
Server hopping, whether for PvE or PvP reasons, created a chicken-or-the-egg situation that climaxed with portal hopping as a Grade 5 Reaper being totally justified.
Manufactured PvE servers are a biproduct of consecutive poor decisions by the devs that disproportionately rewarded inorganic playstyles and server hopping whether it was for PvE or PvP related reasons.
Rare claims that they don't support the notion of Manufactured PvE Servers but also claim there's no way to prevent/solve it. Either they aren't creative enough, or they're talking out of both sides of their mouths...and I'm honestly not sure which it is.
Server Hopping is the reason Manufactured PvE servers exist.
If you can fix/prevent free server hopping, you'd fix a whole lot of problems with this game.
@wolfmanbush yeah my most memorable moments always included a random crew. “It’s the friends you make along the way” had real meaning. But when I stopped getting GGs in the chat and started getting racist/sexist/homophobic comments instead… I lost interest. Of course I reported those people, of course. But it just became such a norm that I quit wanting to interact with the random crews. I’ve still had a fond memory here and there, but it’s rare these days for me and mostly has been people who just want to avoid the toxicity as well.
@magus104 said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
What does shared gold have anything to do with empty seas? Only 5 ships are allowed on a server which is insanely small number of players. So you are complaining about alliance discords which is maybe 5% of the active players in the game... Alliance servers have 0 impact on normal players experience.
Incorrect. Alliance servers remove otherwise peaceful PvE oriented players from the global pool of players you would encounter. Therefore they affect how overall aggressive the server you find yourself in might be. To compound this, the long term effects are other players who want a more peaceful environment either join them or stop playing altogether, furthering the issue and impact. Also as you said below, you are making a wild assumption of them only making up 5% of the player base. Do you have a source for your self-proclaimed metric?
You are making a wild assumption that alliance discords are a much bigger problem than they really are. PvE servers have saved other games yet people like yourself seem to think true PvE servers would kill sea of thieves... They literally have no impact on you because if those discords didn't exist those players would have joined the MILLIONS of others who have quit over lack of proper PvE servers. Stop acting like there's less people out there for you to hunt because they don't like PvP when the reality is they wouldn't be around to hunt in either case. At least this way with them on alliance discords they are still buying micro transactions. I have seen plenty that literally buy everything put into the cash shop. Those whales wouldn't even be playing if it weren't for alliance discords.
See above, your personal POV is biased and skewed from a logical thought process.
@abjectarity said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@wolfmanbush yeah my most memorable moments always included a random crew. “It’s the friends you make along the way” had real meaning. But when I stopped getting GGs in the chat and started getting racist/sexist/homophobic comments instead… I lost interest. Of course I reported those people, of course. But it just became such a norm that I quit wanting to interact with the random crews. I’ve still had a fond memory here and there, but it’s rare these days for me and mostly has been people who just want to avoid the toxicity as well.
In general the vibe hasn't been what I would consider welcoming for quite some time.
On one end the slurs and personal attacks do happen and with a game like this where people can just try it out on gamepass they can just pop in short term and say unkind things or they react harshly to being sunk/robbed, they the game gets dismissed as being toxic.
On the other end this game is incredibly cliquey. For a big multiplayer game it feels like a small town high school more often than not. It creates a vibe that new players just don't invest in and experiences that just aren't fun for them.
The people that were catered to are the ones that largely stuck around and that is people that make content and people that follow those that make content around, the rest are largely new players that aren't going to stick around more than a few sessions or a few weeks.
Being a new player of a couple of weeks I find the community here, and in the game, to be nowhere near as toxic or unwelcoming as the near hysterical rants I see here, on the wider web, and in the Xbox store game reviews.
I generally play every day from 1-3 hours, time dependent on my work pattern more than anything. In that time I’ve been sunk once and chased twice.
Today I crossed paths with two other sloops. One fired a shot at me as he went past but didn’t turn around to attack. It was almost as if it were a warning shot to stay away. Or it could simply have been an invite to duel. But as I just carried on sailing, the other player accepted that and went their own way. A little while later a galleon sailed past me, and a little while later again, another sloop. Both were certainly within hitting distance of me. Both sailed past without anything happening.
To suggest this game is not welcoming or enjoyable for new players is not correct, and again is down to the hysterical few.
I get the impression people get upset simply because they were beaten in a fight, or who silly enough to leave their ships, with treasure onboard, unattended for long periods. Calling somebody a “sweat” seems to me to mean, I got beaten by a young kid who was better than me.
I constantly check the seas around me to almost paranoia. I see a lot of players out there. No idea where this “empty seas” comes from. After all, only 5 ships per server, so you’re not going to see fleets of ships beyond every wave.
@pumpa-cat said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
I constantly check the seas around me to almost paranoia. I see a lot of players out there. No idea where this “empty seas” comes from. After all, only 5 ships per server, so you’re not going to see fleets of ships beyond every wave.
part of it comes from people recording significant amounts of gameplay per day where it clearly shows what others are regularly talking about.
Years of context and experience and footage of experiences to show activity levels.
@abjectarity said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
[ ... ] Even so, that’s 5 ships and 15 pirates per server that are missing from the player base each. At one point in time not too long ago I tried to find as many of these forced alliance servers as possible, I found 16 that still had any activity, not all of them did it daily still. But with that math that’s still only 240 players removed from natural play on an average day. [ ... ]
240 ? That would be 15 pirates for 16 pre-made alliance servers ?
That's not per day, that's for an average session. There are that run 24 hours per day, if an average session is 3 hours that would be
90120 pirates per 24/7 server each day.Goodness knows where they are filming then, as I have never played and not seen other players.
@pumpa-cat said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
Goodness knows where they are filming then, as I have never played and not seen other players.
the most popular/populated regions in the game, mostly
@a10dr4651 said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@pumpa-cat You'll make a fine Sea of Thieves player and a dangerous pirate to cross further down the line. Welcome to the sea's.
Dangerous pirate? My elderly mother would be a more dangerous pirate than me. :D
@wolfmanbush said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
but what is known by players like me that have played and observed consistently for years is that the game in the organic environment has dwindled down to streamers and the active people in their communities and people that post in other social areas, which is why I see sot streamers nearly daily on the seas, and why they sea each other regularly.
Yet, the streamers i watch (almost) never match another streamer they know. For the 3 streamers i watch reguraly during the entire season 7, i only saw them match 1 other streamer they know. Not 1 each, but 1 combined for all of them.
I think the problem of the streamers matching each other is that they are running reapers and searching other reapers to fight. First of all that community is pretty small and they know a lot of others in that community. And in doing that activity, they portal hop about 20-30 time per stream, so they play on a unnormal amount of servers. That obviously means that you get a high chance of facing someone you know since you only look for specific targets (higher ranked reapers, wich are only a smaller part of the entire playerbase) on a large amount of servers. The whole problem with them is that they are NOT playing organicly and that makes it so they encounter other streamers that often.
Players who do play organicly (so not hyperfixated on 1 type of content and not server hopping the entire time) do not encounter the same people time after time. Those players keep meeting new players every time. I don't even think i have ever encountered someone for a second time.
@lem0n-curry said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@abjectarity said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
[ ... ] Even so, that’s 5 ships and 15 pirates per server that are missing from the player base each. At one point in time not too long ago I tried to find as many of these forced alliance servers as possible, I found 16 that still had any activity, not all of them did it daily still. But with that math that’s still only 240 players removed from natural play on an average day. [ ... ]
240 ? That would be 15 pirates for 16 pre-made alliance servers ?
That's not per day, that's for an average session. There are that run 24 hours per day, if an average session is 3 hours that would be
90120 pirates per 24/7 server each day.Correct, that would be max 240 players on any given time (if his number of 16 alliance servers is correct ofcourse). Since i see that at the moment almost 250,000 people are playing (using the playercounter website), that number of 240 players would be less then 0.1% of the currently active playerbase. Even if he would have hugely underestimated the amount of alliance servers and it would be a tenfold of that, it would still be less then 1%. It's just a very tiny amount of the entire playerbase.
@super87ghost said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@wolfmanbush said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
I think the problem of the streamers matching each other is that they are running reapers and searching other reapers to fight. First of all that community is pretty small and they know a lot of others in that community. And in doing that activity, they portal hop about 20-30 time per stream, so they play on a unnormal amount of servers. That obviously means that you get a high chance of facing someone you know since you only look for specific targets (higher ranked reapers, wich are only a smaller part of the entire playerbase) on a large amount of servers. The whole problem with them is that they are NOT playing organicly and that makes it so they encounter other streamers that often.
This was more the case a year+ ago
I saw a partner sailing around 19 times on 19 different days in season 7 alone and we never fought.
I avoided their boat and they avoided mine (I only fight people that attack me or are camping/chasing inexperienced players) They weren't hopping for me and I play organically.
and that's just 1 person, I regularly post in discord how often I see a relatively small group of known players as someone that plays faithfully organically.
At one point I had a 24 hour recent played with list that was 100% known streamers. That's me not playing reaper and playing organically and sailing around and I've never hopped for pvp or pvp targets.
Another partner I saw multiple times in season 7 was coincidentally selling at reapers while I wanted the fleet, we also never had a battle and that one I know is not in my area.
Many more examples
This is significantly different than how it used to be.
@super87ghost said in Wanna fix empty seas?
@lem0n-curry said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@abjectarity said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
[ ... ] Even so, that’s 5 ships and 15 pirates per server that are missing from the player base each. At one point in time not too long ago I tried to find as many of these forced alliance servers as possible, I found 16 that still had any activity, not all of them did it daily still. But with that math that’s still only 240 players removed from natural play on an average day. [ ... ]
240 ? That would be 15 pirates for 16 pre-made alliance servers ?
That's not per day, that's for an average session. There are that run 24 hours per day, if an average session is 3 hours that would be
90120 pirates per 24/7 server each day.Correct, that would be max 240 players on any given time (if his number of 16 alliance servers is correct ofcourse). Since i see that at the moment almost 250,000 people are playing (using the playercounter website), that number of 240 players would be less then 0.1% of the currently active playerbase. Even if he would have hugely underestimated the amount of alliance servers and it would be a tenfold of that, it would still be less then 1%. It's just a very tiny amount of the entire playerbase.
That was my point. Even if I used a pie slice of “240 at any given moment” assuming they could keep the fleets running 24/7(which they can only do about 80% of the time, they tend to die after midnight EST). Even with the “average play session of 3 hours”(which it isn’t on these types of servers, people tend to play longer sessions as they feel more relaxed). With the 120 per day times 16 servers, still only 1,920 pirates out of a supposed 250,000 active player base(according to the tracker website). Still not anywhere close to half the player base. You’d need roughly 1,042 individual allianced fleets to equal half the active player base. Which is definitely not anywhere near how many actually exist.
@super87ghost said in Wanna fix empty seas?: each, but 1 combined for all of them.
[...] @lem0n-curry said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@abjectarity said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
[ ... ] Even so, that’s 5 ships and 15 pirates per server that are missing from the player base each. At one point in time not too long ago I tried to find as many of these forced alliance servers as possible, I found 16 that still had any activity, not all of them did it daily still. But with that math that’s still only 240 players removed from natural play on an average day. [ ... ]
240 ? That would be 15 pirates for 16 pre-made alliance servers ?
That's not per day, that's for an average session. There are that run 24 hours per day, if an average session is 3 hours that would be
90120 pirates per 24/7 server each day.Correct, that would be max 240 players on any given time (if his number of 16 alliance servers is correct ofcourse). Since i see that at the moment almost 250,000 people are playing (using the playercounter website), that number of 240 players would be less then 0.1% of the currently active playerbase. Even if he would have hugely underestimated the amount of alliance servers and it would be a tenfold of that, it would still be less then 1%. It's just a very tiny amount of the entire playerbase.
That number (a quarter of a million at any given time) is higher than I expected. Thought this was of the maginiture of players in a month (3-400k).
Wondering why that website isn't mentioned more often in discussions on 'game is dying', 'not enough players'. Or why Rare is reluctant giving out this kind of information if this website is readily available.
If numbers/guesses are indeed correct (or in the same ballpark), this is a small and insignificant number ... IIRC back in the day some of those PvE alliance servers claimed to have 1000+ members and several servers running at the same time.@abjectarity said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
That was my point. Even if I used a pie slice of “240 at any given moment” assuming they could keep the fleets running 24/7(which they can only do about 80% of the time, they tend to die after midnight EST). Even with the “average play session of 3 hours”(which it isn’t on these types of servers, people tend to play longer sessions as they feel more relaxed). With the 120 per day times 16 servers, still only 1,920 pirates out of a supposed 250,000 active player base(according to the tracker website). Still not anywhere close to half the player base. You’d need roughly 1,042 individual allianced fleets to equal half the active player base. Which is definitely not anywhere near how many actually exist.
As I said above those numbers seem small enough ,
but I nor anyone else mentioned 'half the player base'(just read part of a post I missed), I hope that isn't considered an acceptable percentage of people playing in PvE servers.
Not to be a nitpick, but wouldn't they start new servers after midnight EST ?@lem0n-curry said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
That number (a quarter of a million at any given time) is higher than I expected. Thought this was of the maginiture of players in a month (3-400k).
Wondering why that website isn't mentioned more often in discussions on 'game is dying', 'not enough players'. Or why Rare is reluctant giving out this kind of information if this website is readily available.
If numbers/guesses are indeed correct (or in the same ballpark), this is a small and insignificant number ... IIRC back in the day some of those PvE alliance servers claimed to have 1000+ members and several servers running at the same time.It's probably because that website is not reliable (assuming this is playercounter.com we are talking about). They don't say how they estimate player numbers, and about a year ago they screwed up their wordpress markup and exposed that the numbers are randomized between a min/max range every time you refresh the page.
@d3adst1ck said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@lem0n-curry said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
That number (a quarter of a million at any given time) is higher than I expected. Thought this was of the maginiture of players in a month (3-400k).
Wondering why that website isn't mentioned more often in discussions on 'game is dying', 'not enough players'. Or why Rare is reluctant giving out this kind of information if this website is readily available.
If numbers/guesses are indeed correct (or in the same ballpark), this is a small and insignificant number ... IIRC back in the day some of those PvE alliance servers claimed to have 1000+ members and several servers running at the same time.It's probably because that website is not reliable (assuming this is playercounter.com we are talking about). They don't say how they estimate player numbers, and about a year ago they screwed up their wordpress markup and exposed that the numbers are randomized between a min/max range every time you refresh the page.
Oh :(
That's a shame, I'd rather be proving wrong about an IMO significant number of players cheesing in PvE server alliances but having millions of players active.
@lem0n-curry They don’t die from the server shutting down, just lack of players who stay up that late to fill each boat. Or lack of staff to manage who replaces someone when 1 or more of the crew leave. There’s a whole queue system and volunteer staff and everything on places like Requiem and such. Very organized, lots of rules, forced alliance 5 ship servers. And if they lose a boat they usually disband that fleet as they don’t consider it secure anymore. It’s a whole shebang, way different than the servers that are natural alliance or hunted and coerced alliance. I’ve run into other servers that don’t use discord, use Xbox lfg who bully people into alliancing with them “alliance or die” is their motto.
@lem0n-curry said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@d3adst1ck said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
@lem0n-curry said in Wanna fix empty seas?:
That number (a quarter of a million at any given time) is higher than I expected. Thought this was of the maginiture of players in a month (3-400k).
Wondering why that website isn't mentioned more often in discussions on 'game is dying', 'not enough players'. Or why Rare is reluctant giving out this kind of information if this website is readily available.
If numbers/guesses are indeed correct (or in the same ballpark), this is a small and insignificant number ... IIRC back in the day some of those PvE alliance servers claimed to have 1000+ members and several servers running at the same time.It's probably because that website is not reliable (assuming this is playercounter.com we are talking about). They don't say how they estimate player numbers, and about a year ago they screwed up their wordpress markup and exposed that the numbers are randomized between a min/max range every time you refresh the page.
Oh :(
That's a shame, I'd rather be proving wrong about an IMO significant number of players cheesing in PvE server alliances but having millions of players active.
I do wonder though… how many people play on Xbox or Xbox cloud gaming and have their matchmaking settings put to “prefer controller, Xbox only” and that this actually has a bigger impact on the “missing players” than the PvE servers as I feel most people I see who complain about empty seas play PC or crossplay is enabled(or maybe they are on Xbox only and are complaining as well). I play on both, mostly my Xbox right now, but I have crossplay enabled always.
But with it being a gamepass game, I wonder just how many people are actually tucked away on Xbox only servers vs PC/crossplay servers…
