Lately, the monthly vote graph at gtop caught my attention. Royals currently has around 1600~2200 online "character" count depending on peak times. This includes doppelganger guild people + the dedicated guy who parks 30+ identical characters in FM + all the multiclient logins. I'm aware that Royals is a global server hence the instantaneous player count doesn't reflect the total population. Also, there must be inactive players who still vote frequently. BUT even with all the aforementioned factors counted in, is 8k a realistic number? Has vote abuse gone too far? This doesn't seem normal to me. Spoiler: Screenshot from Gtop
Many friends that have “quit” vote on a daily basis, however I also believe vote abuse is a big factor.
when i first started to play i quit after 2 days but kept voting for like 3 months, im sure im not the only one
The most obvious is when we have double vote event. Not sure if anyone remembers but in one day, the number of votes doubled. I highly doubt the number of unique players voting would suddenly increase 2 folds overnight. I dont think all those who “quit” would keep up so promptly with royals events. And since they are unique players, the increase should just be a little more to compensate those who always forget. I always thought it was a known thing and that gm just ban those who vote abuse. Maybe its really true half of our unique players are just waiting for double vote events to vote, while on normal days they don’t, who knows?
https://royals.ms/forum/threads/should-vote-abusers-be-able-to-make-a-new-account-after-their-banned.133889/#post-77170 It was averaging 3k votes back in jan 2019 but i think that was when the average player count was like <1k online right? I’m not too sure. The other top server averages 7k votes and has slightly less player online count than royals so maybe it’s kinda right?
I actually created a post on this a few years back, and Matt commented that the mapleroyals website frequents more than ~5000 (if im not mistaken) distinct visits a day, and that the votes/day is thus plausible. Granted this was a couple years back and situations might have changed, I'd say are in a similar situation where the numbers make sense for the most part, but there is probably small amounts of vote abuse present if u get down on the nitty gritty math.
" Of course there will be both vote abusers and people who don't actively play who are adding to the vote count, however you cannot really expect for the daily vote count to be very close to the number of players playing at any one time. Once you to take into account the fact that not everybody is online for 24 hours a day and that the ~1000 online players consist of some different players throughout the day, then the daily active player count is likely 3000+. Edit: Just did a query for unique IP's logged into accounts in the past 24 hours and got a result of 3767." - Quoted from Matt years ago. This is in the context of when there were a few hundred - 1000 players (on the high side) online players and there were 4000+ votes/day according to gtop. With the server having 2X the number of online players on average than before, the proportion seems about right with 2X of 8000+ votes/day according to gtop. So, it does not seem that the proportion of "vote abuse" increased per say over the last 2 years when considering the playerbase grew at the same rate. If your argument is that we should have ways to identify users with distinct IP addresses that log into accounts to vote when they are actually the same individual, I have no idea how you would go about doing that without solid evidence or confession from said individual. Further, there is a basic "innocent until proven guilty" premise where unique IP addresses that log into accounts to vote are generally recognized as distinct individuals until there is plausible reason to be suspicious of them. So, to devise methods of distinguishing these individuals (different IP addresses to vote on separate accounts without overtly suspicious activities) seems impossibly hard and maybe someone out here has ideas.
That very post from Matt was from 2018 April. I played actively ever since new source launch till 2021 and if my memory serves properly, royals' online "character" count hardly fell below 1k around this era. As in 1k wasn't a high side but an average. There's another factor to consider which is the dramatic proliferation of mules in the server. As I write this reply, the online count is around 16xx. There's way more mules or extra characters held by individual players on average, when compared to 2018. You'd also be surprised at how inconsistent people become with the voting habit when they go inactive. This thread was created to raise an awareness on one of the most critical issue that seemed to go unnoticed for most playerbase. There are concerns from old players that vote abuse may be pushed down in the priority list because they sustain the gtop no.1 rank. There's no effective way to prevent vote abuse by filtering access addresses. Another server pretty much eliminated the value of nx from votes to counter the vote2win issue. I doubt we'll be able to add the same method but we can surely introduce more obstacles to reduce vote abuse, even at the small inconvenience of legitimate players. An investigation from staff will be appreciated to find out whether my concerns are a false alarm or there's actually an uncontrollable amount of vote abuse taking place on a daily basis.
To be completely transparent, one should do a wide analysis of the situation. 1st.-Whats the real amount of active players?.- OFC we can see from 1400 to 2100 characters active at a time, now, whats the amount of mules constantly logged? theyre online all the time? Not to consider that, as a person with a weird sleep schedule, if i look at main page at 10am(my time) i see a very similar amount of ppl as if i see it at 3 am, i higly doubt that most ppl leave their characters online meanwhile they sleep(ofc, anyone can give me the examples of "x" or "y" ppl that park all the time just to get the "you have been online for 1900 hours, get a life", but those are more anecdotical than a constant), so, taking all of this in count, at least for me, i wouldnt be surprising for me that the actual amount of players actively playing round from 2-3k players. 2nd.-Also count that ppl who play from time to time, and even more important, the fact that, the longer the server exists, the more AFG(Away from Game) votes youll get. Example if i open a server now, and 5 ppl join 5 months later i will have 2 active players, 1 who completely quit, 1 who votes once in a while , when he/she remeber, and 1 that votes daily hoping to come back in a pile of money waiting from him. 1 year later those 1st 2 ppl may have quitted aswell, but keep voting,then 2 new players join, wich will make you see 2 players active, but instead of 3.5 votes daily you will now see 5 votes daily instead and more the more time the server lives And with all of that, as i mentioned in my thread https://royals.ms/forum/threads/lets-make-rwters-life-a-little-bit-harder.183758/ i estimate that around 2-3k votes are from vote abusers, and despite that in the very same thread theres ppl saying that is not the most common work method from rwters, im still shure its one of the biggest, think about it, just witotuh counting the "fair votes" just those 2-3k votes are an influx of 60-to 90 b DAILY, from ppl that dont even take the effort to log, not even to hack, they just do their bussines and pum. Honestly, this is the topic that i thing that staff should be mainly concerned now, not how to nerf hardcore players to make the difference between newbies and veteran shorter and put obstacles in their way, bcs even the more hardcore player in this server, who can use 10 pcs and log 5 clients on each, is not even near as detrimental as these guys who abuse this mechanic. A "hey guys we tought in making these change to screw rtwers, how would this affect you?" and make polls and sht would be a million times better.
I don't think it's abnormal at all. Voting takes 60 seconds. You can vote on your phone, even if you're nowhere near a computer. Plus, who is to say there aren't approximately 8000 unique players logging in and out of the game every 24 hours?
Based on my own experience and observation from friends as well as many ex/current guild members, the voting habit doesn't stay as consistent when people go inactive. This is a subjective opinion hence a verification from staff is required. If 8000 unique players logged in every day, we would have had a way higher instantaneous online character count.
I don't think so. The character count fluctuates between 1600~2200. That's a large margin for people to come and go. Look at how long the average person plays for; that'd be a good way to tell. Personally, I can only stomach about 3 hours a day, and not all at once. I don't know about other people. But it's wrong to assume that a playercount at any point in time should be identical to the amount of votes that are tallied by the end of the day.
I don't recall saying the number of votes should be identical to the online player count. Feel free to quote me if I have said so. We have a reference to work with, provided by Matt in 2018. Over the years, the multi client meta became more prominent and there's enough visual evidence to safely conclude that there are less single client players than the reference era. Regarding the average hours people play per day, I know quite a lot of people who afk ingame for a long duration when they aren't actively using the character because it populates the fm channel or a particular map that their guild or friend circle occupy. If one examines the reference ratio and additional factors that further disfavor the ratio, it's natural to suspect a flaw in the amount of daily votes.
