Good evening.
There are plenty ways to measure MUD activity, but eventually the fairest one is to sum the time spent by players logged on in a given period of time (one week, one month, whatever). To make it even more truer, the quantity of different players that have logged in that same period should be shown as well.

I am posting to hear the sensitivites of the community on the following:

- in a simplest case, if a MUD with clean records is up for 1 hour with 2 players on since it restarted, the correct overall 7d activity should be 2 hours. Is this an intuitive understanding? (used this example exactly to highlight how odd it can be a mud running for 1 hour and state the overall activity is 2 hours, even though I find it logic).
- it's always hard to propose any change to known protocols, but wouldn't be useful to display this value (or similar) in MSSP?

Thank you.

That's similar to the way I calculate it, but I display it as an average number of players. So if 2 players played for 1 hour, there would be "an average of 2 players over 1 hour". If there was 1 player for the first 30 minutes, and 2 players for the remaining 30 minutes, it would instead be "an average of 1.5 players over 1 hour".


You could, but I doubt many muds would support it, and as a result I doubt any crawlers would use it.

MSSP already tells you how many players are currently connected, and crawlers can use that to generate an average number of connections, as well as show highs and lows (along with graphs showing peak times and so on).

If you want accurate data for activity, you have to use (connected time - afk time). Many muds have players (especially admins) who sit afk for 23 hours and 30 minutes out of the day, but would still be counted as "active" by a simple user count. :)

AFK characters, idle characters, bots (including scripted characters run by players who are mostly working in another window, but who still keep an eye on the mud), alts (including those using proxies), people who sit in safe locations chatting instead of actively playing, etc. But these sort of things can be very difficult to verify, and I doubt you'd convince many mud owners to implement an MSSP option that makes their game look less popular.

That's why I consider the MSSP item useless. It's just as easy to code it to return random(100) + 100, as it is to return the actual player count, let alone the non-AFK player count.

Personally, I don't object to bots or chatting players being counted… they are both actively using your game (even if perhaps not the way you want them to). But most MUD's do track AFK status, so it's pretty simple to only show people who have been active within the last 15 minutes.

As you say though, people who think the value is useful probably want to inflate it where possible. :)

Nice, thanks for both answers. Though expected more examples like Kavir's… ;)