As of mid September of 2011, I have had the ability to track player activity in TWGS v2. Only those running v2.08+ are able to participate in this player activity tracking. Roughly 40% of all TWGS v2 installs have been v2.07 or lower, and 60% v2.08 and higher, but all new installs are the latest version, so the number of servers participating in player activity tracking will continue to grow moving forward. But of the few months tracked in 2011, and the initially small but growing number of servers providing this information, here are the stats:

From September 4 to the end of December 2011, there were 1,585 unique players running games.

In December 2011, there were 597 unique players running games.

The total number of servers that were active in 2011 was just over 900. The average number of servers consistently active during 2011 was approximately 80. It is common for a server to come online for a single game among a small group of friends, while it is less common for a server to be publicly active 24/7 for months or years. But over the year, we tended to maintain a level of about 80 active servers at any given time.

None of these numbers reflect servers that were run on local networks and were unable to reach the TWGS servers to report uptime and activity. I believe this is very common. But we can only track publicly accessible servers.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the server base and active player count behaves during 2012 as we see more servers adopting TWGS v2 and continue to see players and gameops rediscovering the game. Will we continue to see the same players, or will the player base continue to grow? Will we continue to see a majority of players on private, personal sites, or will we see more cross-over of these players to the smaller group of public sites? Could we achieve a sustained player base of over 1000 players, or will we continue to see a transient player population that plays for a few days or weeks and then moves on? Stay tuned and I'll keep you updated on stats as I compile them.

I expect 2012 to be a great year for TradeWars. But whatever happens, the most important thing is to have fun!

That's great news JP, keep up the good work.

Is this optional? or is it just running all the time reporting data? I am good either way just didn't know you had it sending data your direction now.

When TWGS begins to seriously gather data, that will be optional. All this is doing is registering a count of servers online each day and players entering games each day, by IP address. No other data is gathered. It does this through two kinds of contact that TWGS makes to the EIS servers. One is when TWGS checks for the latest version to see if a new one is available. I track each check to see which servers are running. The second is when TW starts up and pings the EIS server to get a news message. I use this contact to track how often the games are running. So it's very basic tracking. No data gathering.

Eventually I want to start tracking a lot of data about games, but that will be done through Jumpgate, and will be optional. The main purpose of that will be so that I can provide detailed information about servers on the Jumpgate site, both for private and public use. This could include not only information about the kinds of games running, but also detailed information about a game that recently finished, showing graphs of player assets, etc. I think there's a lot that can be done with that kind of info.

OK, figured I might as well ask before the firestorm gets started

I'm definitely aware of people's expectation of privacy and concerns about software that can be too nosy. I personally hate that in so many apps I run today. Some apps really push the envelope on what's acceptable.