25,000 people online, where is everyone at? Official servers are dead, community has maybe 5,000 (on DZSA)

[Valentina Shevchenko]

[baddoggs]

We heard you were coming and hid.

[Rally]

Alot of people cant use DZSA cause host wont let it work, better to use the official launcher to find all the people.

[wrath]

weird that 29% of players have the killed first infected achievement, dead internet theory?

[Zeca Paugordinho]

They count zombies too..

[Amogus]

Originally posted by wrath:

weird that 29% of players have the killed first infected achievement, dead internet theory?

Modded servers don't give progression on achievements, so people who have only played modded will never have any achievements

[Scottney]

That's exactly what I'm saying. It says 39k online currently and every server is like 2 players.. 3 players and there are only like 7 of them.. community servers, official servers.. where are these people that are supposedly playing? I just bought it and I'm about to refund it because boring AF

[Valentina Shevchenko]

Originally posted by Scottney:

That's exactly what I'm saying. It says 39k online currently and every server is like 2 players.. 3 players and there are only like 7 of them.. community servers, official servers.. where are these people that are supposedly playing? I just bought it and I'm about to refund it because boring AF

Make sure to check all your filters and stuff, that is a issue with new players sometimes. You should see way more then 7 servers. If you need help add me!

[_KC76_]

Originally posted by Scottney:

That's exactly what I'm saying. It says 39k online currently and every server is like 2 players.. 3 players and there are only like 7 of them.. community servers, official servers.. where are these people that are supposedly playing? I just bought it and I'm about to refund it because boring AF

There are roughly 15 THOUSAND active Community servers .. with 3 players each, that's 45,000 players .. What you see, 2 players per server, is about correct, if you average the numbers .. in reality, it's not an average over all servers, since many of those 15,000 servers are empty personal servers on someone's home PC .. most active players are on one of 5 large groups of servers, mostly based in the UK: Spaggies(UK), KarmaKrew(UK), and Rearmed(US) servers, for example, probably has near full servers for 3/4 of the day.

Checkout Battlemetrics for real server pops:
https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz

[1337Dude]

Originally posted by _KC76_:

Originally posted by Scottney:

That's exactly what I'm saying. It says 39k online currently and every server is like 2 players.. 3 players and there are only like 7 of them.. community servers, official servers.. where are these people that are supposedly playing? I just bought it and I'm about to refund it because boring AF

There are roughly 15 THOUSAND active Community servers .. with 3 players each, that's 45,000 players .. What you see, 2 players per server, is about correct, if you average the numbers .. in reality, it's not an average over all servers, since many of those 15,000 servers are empty personal servers on someone's home PC .. most active players are on one of 5 large groups of servers, mostly based in the UK: Spaggies(UK), KarmaKrew(UK), and Rearmed(US) servers, for example, probably has near full servers for 3/4 of the day.

Checkout Battlemetrics for real server pops:
https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz

Okay, time for fun.

BattleMetrics shows a player discrepancy between what Steam reports. AFAIK BattleMetrics shows every player connected to DayZ online.

Check the stats tab of BattleMetrics here --> https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz/stats

Steam shows 55k peak in the last 24 hours, but that's not corroborated by BattleMetrics. The discrepancy is in the thousands.

Maybe the OP is right after all? Apparently there are thousands of DayZ Steam players missing from the game.

Are they just all sitting AFK at server browser or game menu? I mean, I guess it's possible. It's not an insane discrepancy.

[HolyRustedMetal]

Where do you find the peak 24h count on Steam? I only see the current number. Battlemetrics shows that 55k too but it's a bit older than 24 hours. I guess steam reports the peak of the previous day?

People who keep the launcher open in the background are also a part of the total number.

[1337Dude]

Originally posted by HolyRustedMetal:

Where do you find the peak 24h count on Steam? I only see the current number. Battlemetrics shows that 55k too but it's a bit older than 24 hours. I guess steam reports the peak of the previous day?

People who keep the launcher open in the background are also a part of the total number.

https://steamdb.info/charts/ - Pulled from Steam's databases, shows a peak of 55.6k players yesterday.

https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz/stats - Shows DayZ had 52k players peak yesterday.

Like I said, it's not an insane discrepancy. It's possible to imagine these are people sitting AFK on the server browser.

Current game at spot #100 of Steam's Most Played Games only has ~10k players. In other words, the amount of players playing DayZ without being connected to a server is about 1/3 the player count of Phasmophobia or Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Kind of funny to think about.

I wish we had a meaningful breakdown of the demographics by geography. I know for a fact that as a PNW DayZ player, I'm only interacting with a fraction of the DayZ players due to sheer distance affecting ping. East coast DayZ servers are relatively laggy for someone living in the PNW.

If you split up the player count between geography, playstyles, server preferences, etc. - it seems easy to imagine why DayZ feels like a relatively dead and empty game for the amount of players it has. As a vanilla-oriented PvP player, there's never more than 1-3 servers that is populated, good ping, not too modded, etc. Meanwhile I could boot up Rising Storm 2, a game that's not even on the top 1000 currently played games, and find a higher number of servers I can play on.

If you consider that the built-in server browser for DayZ literally doesn't work, it's a wonder that the game has the playerbase it currently has.

[_KC76_]

Originally posted by 1337Dude:

Originally posted by _KC76_:

There are roughly 15 THOUSAND active Community servers .. with 3 players each, that's 45,000 players .. What you see, 2 players per server, is about correct, if you average the numbers .. in reality, it's not an average over all servers, since many of those 15,000 servers are empty personal servers on someone's home PC .. most active players are on one of 5 large groups of servers, mostly based in the UK: Spaggies(UK), KarmaKrew(UK), and Rearmed(US) servers, for example, probably has near full servers for 3/4 of the day.

Checkout Battlemetrics for real server pops:
https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz

Okay, time for fun.

BattleMetrics shows a player discrepancy between what Steam reports. AFAIK BattleMetrics shows every player connected to DayZ online.

Check the stats tab of BattleMetrics here --> https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/dayz/stats

Steam shows 55k peak in the last 24 hours, but that's not corroborated by BattleMetrics. The discrepancy is in the thousands.

Maybe the OP is right after all? Apparently there are thousands of DayZ Steam players missing from the game.

Are they just all sitting AFK at server browser or game menu? I mean, I guess it's possible. It's not an insane discrepancy.

If you scroll down farther on the Battlemetric page you linked, it has the stats for Servers .. Check out the numbers of servers online vs. Offline, with and without players, and the times of day they change, for a 24 hour period, and compare that with the top stat for player counts .. things get a lot more clear, and it confirms what I said about a lot of the reported servers are peoples personal servers on their home PC, that regularly get zero players. Reducing to a 24 hr period (must change each set individually) also helps show who is playing, because you can correlate it to geographic region (mostly Russian Federation), if we assume that many people work or have school during the "daytime" hours of their region.

As for the difference between Steam and Battlemetrics, Steam counts all players who are sitting with the launcher open .. I'm pretty sure Battlemetrics only counts players who connect to a server, and trigger BattlEye connectivity, but I am not privy to the actual API they use to get their stats.

[cha0tic]

You can hide your server from public view. I suspect a lot of people playing only with friends do this. Some probably also play local servers only as a single player method.

[_KC76_]

Originally posted by cha0tic:

You can hide your server from public view. I suspect a lot of people playing only with friends do this. Some probably also play local servers only as a single player method.

The only way that I know of to "hide" your server, is to not open the ports on your Router, keeping all your server traffic on your LAN .. which would require your friends to be physically at your location and connected to your local network, if you are playing anything other than single-player private LAN.
Edit: Even at that, if you do not have BattlEye disabled, you are still connecting to the BattlEye servers, and you are always connecting to the Steam Authentication servers when playing private LAN .. so, again, depending on how BattleMetrics is collecting data (which, and who's API they use), this may not be the case.