As a professional with a mortgage, kids, a dog and a cat, I didn't have time to sit there and manually 'farm' for food."Įveriss suggested to us independently that Evony has up to a million players - some way short of that "16m/18m/20m" figure, and if there were a web Advertising Standards Authority, you could probably take Evony to them over that "played by" quote. Thor gave it up when Evony began cracking down on bots: "I actively botted to support the insanely huge army sizes necessary to compete.
So any number of servers for the game that Evony claims to have should be taken with a pinch of salt, because old server numbers aren't retired. Merge of our server, it wasn't uncommon for me to go weeks without someone attacking me (or vice-versa) and I'd either have to 'port a war-city around the grid to find targets, or have insanely huge army march distances measured in hundreds of miles to an active target") and counting the clearly active players.
Thor made an estimate of the number of active players by logging into the servers then operated (around 200 - except some were merged servers, because there were too few players on an individual server to get any, you know, war action/payment going: "the reason Evony merges servers is the player rate on servers starts to drop so low it is virtually impossible to support active gameplay with players attacking back and forth. Thor explained that Evony cleans out "inactive" accounts every so often, which is why the number of players on the servers can fall: "An inactive is defined as someone who hasn't logged on for 30+ days and has never paid Evony money to buy game coins."īut there's inactive and there's "inactive": "If you paid, ever, your account is never wiped, even if you haven't logged in for 6 or more months," Thor explains. Of those, only 300-500 show any activity on a regular basis (daily or weekly change in prestige totals - prestige increases anytime you make troops or build something in the game)." They have approximately 200 "worlds", and each world has between 8000 to 25000 accounts. "In my estimation, Evony has probably has a maximum of a half-million to million active players. Another former Evony player - who we'll call "Thor" because, well, why not? - told us how he came up with an estimate for the number of players: 'Twas ever thus on server-based MMORPGs, of course. "Evony have regular purges and kick large numbers of people off the game for "cheating". "The overwhelming majority register, see that it has no breasts, then leave." (A reference to Evony's infamous web advertising campaign of mid-2009.) "Very many players have multiple registrations which confer great advantage when playing the game," Everiss notes. "The Evony figure for players is for all the people who have ever registered for the game," he told us by email. What on earth is going on? Where have all the "players" gone? More to the point, were they ever there?īruce Everiss, who was the victor when Evony tried to sue him for libel - except that Gifford's testimony was torn apart in the court in a way that would make Perry Mason whistle appreciatively - is quite clear that the 18m (or 20m or 16m) number is just a bit of inflation: So that's a sudden addition of 4m players in the course of four days, followed by a dropoff of 2m. (Click here for larger version.) (Note that the dates on the brown panel are in American MM-DD-YYYY format - not UK DD-MM-YYYY format.)Įven so, this is still contradictory, because in an email to the Guardian on 8 April, Gifford told the Guardian "both Evony, LLC and Regan Mercantile, LLC hope attention will turn to the game that 16 million people have enjoyed." Here's the screenshot we took on 12 April. Where did the other 2m go? And were they ever real? screenshot on 12 April 2010: here it claims 20m players.
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