Number of players on King??

[msufan]

So yesterday I noticed on King it said there were like 590,000 players playing. Right now it says there are 498,239. I thought that number was always like 100,000 before. Am I wrong -- has it always been this high? If not, what changed? Did they partner with someone new?

[Kworb]

Perhaps all the people who play on Facebook are included now. I've never paid attention to the number so I can't verify that it changed.

[Jacob]

If the player volume is so high now, why does it still take 3-4 hours for me to get matched up with someone on Candy Crush?

[Jacob]

Seriously though, I think Kworb is right. If the player population did truly increase five fold, we'd be seeing way higher stakes in progressives...but that isn't happening.

[iammee]

Yeah, I remember a year or two King said they'd give a set amount to breast cancer research each day of the week 150,000 was hit, or something like that. If i recall correctly, they had to lower that number since it wasn't being hit.

A bunch of progressives have been dropped lately, and I'm sure it's not because of increased players, so must be a change in the way they're counting players or something because that's a huge jump.

[dpaull414]

Maybe it just changed after their downtime last night? I've noticed it lately (prior to downtime) and it's been 80,000 to 150,000. Surely to realize such a massive increase it has to be a change in the way they are counting. Or a new bug.

It reminds me of something happened at the company I worked for. We started to collect usage stats about the number of people who were logged in, and what we found was that if people just hit the X in the top right corner to close our app, the system wouldn't write out to the underlying tables when they logged out. So when we wrote queries to look at the table, we had a whole bunch of users who would have a START_DATE_TIME but no END_DATE_TIME. Our assumption had been that if somebody didn't have an END_DATE_TIME recorded they were on the system. When we got a huge number far in excess of the entire user base we knew something was not right. and when we looked at rows we'd see users with START_DATE_TIME way in the past. Good times. I miss work. Not.

Yeah, I remember a year or two King said they'd give a set amount to breast cancer research each day of the week 150,000 was hit, or something like that. If i recall correctly, they had to lower that number since it wasn't being hit.

A bunch of progressives have been dropped lately, and I'm sure it's not because of increased players, so must be a change in the way they're counting players or something because that's a huge jump.

[iammee]

Maybe it just changed after their downtime last night?

I actually noticed 400,000+ "players" a couple of days ago, so it was before the downtime. But yeah, probably a bug, since even with Facebook games, this seems like a huge number to be online at once.