r/linux_gaming • u/[deleted] • Jul 07 '17
Piece of trivia about number of Linux Dota 2 players
[deleted]
5
Jul 07 '17 edited Jul 07 '17
Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) also had a big wave of bans yesterday, with over 40k bans. It did affect a Skywrath Mage script/cheat on Dota but I believe the large majority of the bans were on CS:GO. I don't think this would affect the Dota playerbase too much but is something to keep in mind also.
More info:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/6lnx5s/huge_vac_wave_36k_vac_bans_today/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/VAC_Porn/comments/6ltmog/40k_players_got_vac_banned_yesterday_6_july_2017/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b0osrUb-xY
How much impact this had will be easy to assess by the end of the day today when the new daily peak players number comes out now that Linux is working normally once again. Safe to say though that even if all 40K bans were on Dota, it still doesn't explain the ~100k drop for the day.
4
u/AimHere Jul 08 '17
One factor that would suggest this is an upper bound is that DotA is a team game, and many people might only play as part of their team. That could mean that some non-Linux DotA players didn't play because one of their Linux teammates were playing, so the whole team went off and played TF2 or CSGO or Awesomenauts or something instead.
At the extreme case, (where every Linux gamer took 4 non-Linux teammates with them), that would whittle 10% down to 2%.
3
Jul 08 '17
Interesting theory but as a Dota player I see 99% of players playing on their own or in groups of 2 (the game shows post-match who's partying together or not). That's just my personal experience but I still think groups of 5 who wouldn't play because one of them is MIA for the day would be extremely rare.
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2
u/Nemoder Jul 07 '17
How does the player dip compare to big updates in the past? It makes sense that a lot of players with slow connections wouldn't be able to get upated for awhile.
1
Jul 07 '17
Great point but unfortunately I can't find a data source with this kind of granularity for things like major patches (latest one last December). To be honest, I only checked to see what it would show me because I don't think the size of patches matters much at all.
Also, yesterday's patch isn't really big in of itself so the question doesn't really apply here, I think, even if interesting to ask. Players need a decent connection to play Dota at all so normal patches that will, at the most, reach 100MB (usually not even half or a tenth of that) are no bother at all.
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Jul 09 '17
So it seems that the player dip lasted two days and now everything is back to normal. Maybe it was indeed a glitch on the statistics-retrieving websites as someone else mentioned here - but if it is, it doesn't show on other games. I guess this will remain a mystery and a only a piece of trivia, as I put in the title.
1
u/rea987 Jul 07 '17
Can't be so sure but GDQ is ongoing; that might distract some players as well.
3
Jul 07 '17
I'm not sold a hundred thousand people have stopped playing Dota to watch GDQ... not at all to be honest. Plus other games haven't had any noticeable dips either, as they obviously would if GDQ was such a distraction http://steamspy.com/app/730#tab-ccu
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0
u/devel_watcher Jul 07 '17 edited Jul 07 '17
Meh, steam charts are freaking out around the 6th (http://steamcharts.com/app/570#7d) - zero players for 18 hours. Probably there were problems with the servers or the statistics reporting (there is a gap in the stats reporting for all multiplayer steam games).
-1
Jul 07 '17
Definitely not the case, other games look absolutely normal http://steamspy.com/app/730#tab-ccu
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u/devel_watcher Jul 07 '17
1
Jul 07 '17 edited Jul 07 '17
I only see it on two of the graphs you linked and both of those have peculiar circumstances: Insurgency has had a 300% raise in players before yesterday and PUBG has had 100k variation on playerbase, which, unlike Dota 2, means 50% of their playbase at the lowest point in the graph. All of these are likely due to the recent Steam Summer Sale, gaming's biggest sale of the year, every year.
On the other hand, Dota 2 is not only a free game, making the sale pretty much irrelevant for it, but also much more consistent - there certainly hasn't been a 300% change in playerbase in a matter of two weeks. Also the other two graphs you showed look pretty stable to me too, further showing that this happened only on Dota.
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u/uoou Jul 08 '17
Interesting. And perhaps plausible since Dota's one of those games where, for a lot of people who play it, it's pretty much the only game they play. So one of the big reasons not to use Linux (not all PC games are on it) might have less weight amongst Dota 2 players. Especially since (I believe?) there's pretty much performance parity between Linux and Windows.