3 Aug 2023, 22:04

I think @Polk has it, total players is probably total bits created over the lifetime of the MUSH. Imagine if we had 700 regular MUSH users logging in daily! Man, that’d be like 90s era MUSHing. The left side is probably counting individual logins. Based on the data provided I’m not too sure if that’s logins per IP (limited per 24 hour period) or total login attempts made to the MUSH per day. The latter would create a lot of noise with people losing connection and reconnecting, or logging in, checking +watch/equivalent code to see if friends are around, then logging out, etc. A smart coder would put in a limitation on number of attempts per IP per day. That said, this is an extremely confusing chart.

If it IS tracking individual bit access (which it seems to imply), this shouldn’t be adding up to anything because it’s a rolling total. It would mean in the last 3 months there were 219 login attempts made by individual players, whereby this last week was relatively slow except for a day ago when nearly 60 individual players connected to the game. A pretty respectable number, but this isn’t tracking how much activity those 60 people had in one day – though I did see a pose counter above – or how long they remained on the game before logging out.

The longitudinal data here going back to 90 days also a weird choice from both a UX and data usefulness perspective. At a glance and without thinking about it too much, it appears there are declining numbers which isn’t ideal to show your userbase – they’ll likely know that you have declining numbers because they’ll have experienced it, and this will reinforce it. From a data collection perspective, a rolling quarterly total is not going to give you any more information than a monthly one.

If it’s tracking any connection made at all to the server (less likely and really not a useful metric for the customer-facing UX but still possible because it can be useful from an admin perspective), then that means that there were 219 successful TCP handshakes made in the last 90 days, which could potentially be someone logging in multiple times because their internet isn’t great (or they’re idling out). Also, considering many people MUSH on mobile devices now and I’m pretty sure there are Android and Apple clients that have auto-reconnect, one consideration would be people who stepped out of range of a router or lost their data connection and had it reconnect.

I sincerely hope they wouldn’t use the latter since that’s a bit… dishonest, but having never played here and looking back at the thread I guess I wouldn’t be too surprised. Wow, I didn’t intend this to be that long, but boy do I hate shitty graphs and charts!