Hence we see more players at cycle-start (duh) then in the concurrent days.
Yes, 20k more at the same time then at any other time. Also the lower dip is nigh identical to the high peaks of the other days. Hence the outcome is that we have 20k people coming in, seeing that either they don’t have enough new content to engage which or issues they want to have solved not solved or… whatever else reason there is and deciding ‘no thanks, maybe not now’ and overall not coming back.
Which… is 100% fine and normal!
But… no, it wasn’t spread out over the day after, it was just people dipping their feet in and seeing what the deal with it is.
I wasn’t saying that just to get technical about it, but I should have elaborated: the fact that it only snapshots on the hour every hour means that every time the actual number is higher.
For example, it snapshots at 20h 53k. It raises to 58k at 20h30, then drops to 55k at 21h. Steam only shows a raise from 53k to 55k, even though the peak was higher.
Mostly this is negligible, but on launches it’s quite likely that there are higher differences between the snapshot and the actual peak. Especially with 1.0 where lots and lots of people couldn’t actually play and many just quit.
Concurrent is closest thing to a how alive the game is. For LE it is less impactful then say Guildwars 2 as your mostly doing content alone vs as a group where you need 300ppl to do the content. Not sure how many players need to be in MG to make it fair. But that is why cof exists
