https://forum.eternalcrusade.com/th...an-overview-of-factions-and-maps-in-ec.56591/ There's one thread about stats, I'm not sure which live it was where they were showing more metrics about playerbase etc. Also if you use steamspy you can see up to hourly level of player counts and other stats. I think the stats guy they had (still have?) has a pretty good understanding of what's statistically meaningful and how to use the metrics data, at least to me his reasoning was pretty down to earth.
https://www.twitch.tv/40kcrusade/v/92232758 Around the 40 minute mark they start discussing stats, and these are as follows for population, as per the end of September: CSM: 24.11% Eldar: 12.03% Ork: 13.66% SM 50.2% Accounting every player who plays >90% of the time as ONE faction. Back then, Eldar + Ork = CSM population, and CSM + Eldar + Ork = LSM population. Back in that moment, Eldar, the smallest faction, was winning 67.8% of their matches as the smallest faction, and the largest faction was winning 38% of games, so roughly 2/5 games. Added to that, the largest guilds at the time were CSM and LSM, with the rest averaging at very small numbers. Mind that as per their data, guilded players were earning 278% more XP than unguilded players (a rough estimate on skill, since they show that the average guilded player was already better at the game in their first matches than the average unguilded player) Naturally these numbers are outdated, but with peaks of a concurrent average of between 818 to 1073 players in the past week (median of 946, all of course if I read SteamSpy correctly, which I might not have since I had never used it before) , it gives us an idea of the numbers we could be looking at at any given peak hour in the day if we transpose the outdated population data from a month back: CSM: 227 players. Eldar: 114 players. Orks: 123 players. LSM: 475 players. All I mean to say with this out of the blue wall of text born from me waiting from my coffee to be done is that skill matters a lot in this game still (or arguably unbalanced factions? I'm not getting into that discussion because I don't have much insight on that since we're talking data), and that populations for the least popular factions going down has a much more significant impact on the overall performance of the faction as a whole. SO, the point is, that 5/10/20 players leaving, say the Eldar or Ork faction because of balance issues (be them real or perceived, again, not getting into that) in favor of one of the bigger factions -instantly- impacts the game into producing results in the smallest factions that could easily lead to read it as them being unable to perform, because these veterans adding themselves to the larger pools of players give the bigger factions a lesser statistical growth in performance when compared to how rapidly it makes the small faction decline. Also sorry about the rant, maybe none of this is even relevant to the discussion at this point, but I found the data you mentioned and I thought I'd give it an improvised, very much not thought out spin to establish my point. P.S: This also leads me to another thought: with the current lack of health in population, I still really can't grasp bE's fixation with catering towards the LSM audience when they have proven to have the healthiest population numbers. It's catering to the favorite, the one that will be played anyway, over the people the favorite is playing against, which should be promoted more if you want to sell me a 4-faction shooter.
