There are a lot of factors to take in account when talking about the playercount.
For once, the christmas holidays ended last week, and a lot of people have to follow irl responsibilities during the week. Furthermore, at this time of the year a lot of schools and universities start their exam periods. (As does mine and those of a whole group of staff members).
Apart from that, there has been a huge update of server features right when we switched to legacy mode that also influenced playercount greatly.
The lagcomp/legacy switch may be a major factor in playercount, or maybe not. As far as i see it, this discussion is lacking actual facts to back up some of the arguments, so let's add a few data that may be helpful to the cause:
The first thing to be mentioned here is that the lagshot trial period has not been held for seven, but only six days. The second thing to be seen is that the christmas holidays had a major influence on the playercount, and seeing where they ended the playercount dropped.
Notably the day with the lowest peak ammount of players was thursday
before the update - when the server was still on lagcomp.
Beginning with the 8th January, the update on v2.9.3 was released, resulting in a steady peak of a small bit beneath 40 players over the course of the weekend. With the end of the weekend, playercount drops again.
Unfortunately, there is no statistical way to extract informations about how exactly legacy mode influenced playercount, for the following reasons:
There is no reference data for the common playercount on lagcomp. The only data we have available for the time being on lagcomp are the christmas holidays, which are not representative for the usual weekday data, and a single week between these holidays and the update where there's simply not enough data to draw any conclusions from. To illustrate this matter, try computing a weekly average with data of
one week, a.k.a try to compute the average of a single number.
The ammount of data collected with legacy mode is not representative. Of course we start off with the same problem as the one week mentioned above: We only have run the test for six days yet - which means two things: We can't even get statistical informations about how this change has done within one week - because the week isn't even finished. And secondly we can't possibly infer any informations about how it will trend in general from such little ammount of data. Also, there were other factors, such as the general server update and the oncomming exam periods that possibly interfere the influence the switch to legacy had, which leads me to the last point:
The statistical significance[1] of legacy mode influencing playercount is not given. Through all the influencing factors in the given data, the switch to legacy mode alone cannot be properly extracted. And even if it could be, by polls, surveys, etc, the error rate with only this few of data is so high that the possibility of legacy mode being the cause of any observed playercount drop is so low that it can't be seriously interpreted as such.
Conclusion: Running the test for a longer period will help in increasing the relevance of the data for a well-based review of the effects of switching to legacy mode, and will also help extracting and separating the influence of legacy mode on the playercount from other temporary factors.
Please review your numbers and make sure your claims are backed by actual empirical facts - don't just generalize incompletely from insufficient ammounts of data.
edit: Sorry Spitfire, i started this before your post and thought it'd be a shame throwing it away.
