"Too many connections" is good news?

[Velax]

From what I've read on the forums, I'd assumed player numbers were slowly decreasing. But I've been seeing this "Too many connections" notice quite a bit lately. Are there more players? Or are existing players just logging on more?

[Chas]

I know it is becoming annoying, as it happens around the same time, now. Which co insides when i am able to play.

[De-Legro]

It more likely is a result of a large number of players being online at a single time then a increase in total player numbers.

[Chenier]

Honestly, my bet was on a decrease in server quality/performance. Player numbers have gone significantly down over the last 4 years, and while I occasionally saw this prop up before, it has only become regular lately.

Seems to usually occur around 11:00 EST, or an hour or so before turn change. For me at least.

[Shenron]

I can gladly report I haven't seen this notice in years  ???

[De-Legro]

Honestly, my bet was on a decrease in server quality/performance. Player numbers have gone significantly down over the last 4 years, and while I occasionally saw this prop up before, it has only become regular lately.

Seems to usually occur around 11:00 EST, or an hour or so before turn change. For me at least.

It is possible that since Tom has gone to a hosting service, that they are limiting the amount of concurrent connections in order to reduce the load on their system. It is hard to say without details of what kind of hosting he has.

[Chenier]

It is possible that since Tom has gone to a hosting service, that they are limiting the amount of concurrent connections in order to reduce the load on their system. It is hard to say without details of what kind of hosting he has.

It is what I assumed.

[vonGenf]

Does anyone have statistics on the actual player decrease over the long term? The statistics page only goes 30 days back.

[Chenier]

Does anyone have statistics on the actual player decrease over the long term? The statistics page only goes 30 days back.

Somewhere on the wiki, I saved a french version of a wiki page entry for the game. Player number is mentioned there, and it dates from July 2007 I believe.

I went to check, it's a 400 player drop since then. I'm pretty confident that player count was still raising when I wrote that article, though, so the actual drop since X date later was greater. If you look up the d-list archives, you'll see another message where I mention the decaying player count, so you could have another number to work with. No idea when that was, though... think it was within the last 2 years.

And this I can't really support, though, but seem to recall that activity rates were much higher back then, too. That these 2 lines were closer to the top line than they are now.