Planetside 2 Server Hourly Population Statistics

[kereD]

Nice job. If you are willing to share, may I ask how you got this data? I'm interested in replicating it for the information of our outfit on Briggs.

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by kereD

Nice job. If you are willing to share, may I ask how you got this data? I'm interested in replicating it for the information of our outfit on Briggs.

I query for all the players that have a "last login" within the previous 12 hours. I retrieve a minimal amount of data from the API for all those players including their character name, last login, and if they're online currently. If they are currently in the game then I add 1 for that faction. If they aren't on but their last login is within the last hour then I add 1 for their faction.

Now the goal here is to count all the unique characters that have logged into the game within the last hour. My method counts anyone currently logged in and anyone that has logged into the game and is still currently playing.

The edge case it does not count is if the player logs into the game and plays for more than an hour and then logs off. It will not count them for their last hour of play if that makes sense.

All in all though the method seems to give a basic hourly estimate.

[kereD]

Hi thanks for that information, however I can't get the data to work for me in a usable way.
The problem I encountered is that the api will only return a maximum 20k records at a time reliably with their online status etc, if I get more than 20k records then some of the returned characters will not contain their online status. If I try recursing backwards through time the data doesn't match between each call.

Are you able to share what your api calls are for me as i'm drawing a blank now here. Thanks.

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by kereD

Hi thanks for that information, however I can't get the data to work for me in a usable way.
The problem I encountered is that the api will only return a maximum 20k records at a time reliably with their online status etc, if I get more than 20k records then some of the returned characters will not contain their online status. If I try recursing backwards through time the data doesn't match between each call.

Are you able to share what your api calls are for me as i'm drawing a blank now here. Thanks.

Oh yeah I've explained this in another thread before, but I grab them in batches. so like 200 at a time sorted by id and then I filter by results greater than the largest id in the last batch. This allows me to query in batches of 100 characters.

$requestUrl = "http://census.soe.com/<your id>/get/ps2/character/?id=>" . $currentMaxID . "&times.last_login=>" . $twelveHoursAgo . "&c:resolve=world,online_status&c:show=id,name.fir st,faction_id,times.creation,times.last_login,time s.minutes_played,battle_rank.value,world_id,online _status&c:sort=id&c:limit=" . $batchAmount;

If you don't want to store and manage the data you can use my public API as long as you don't abuse it. I have other people using it.

For population for all servers summed together:
http://sirisian.com/planetside2/populationapi.php

For population of a single server:
http://sirisian.com/planetside2/popu...i.php?world=17

All server populations:
http://sirisian.com/planetside2/popu...rld=compareall

You can append &hourfromstart=2554 to begn from any time. Just be aware that the hourfromstart is the hours after November 20th 2012.
http://sirisian.com/planetside2/popu...fromstart=2554

Simple json objects you can read into PHP then generate your page with. (Note JS can't do cross domain calls as you might know). Donations Accepted

[Emperor Newt]

Anybody able and willing to extract peak values out of the data? Would be interested to quicky see the highest peak number of players. At least per month. Maybe even week or day but I don't think that tells much. Month might be more interesting in terms of a trend.

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by Emperor Newt

Anybody able and willing to extract peak values out of the data? Would be interested to quicky see the highest peak number of players. At least per month. Maybe even week or day but I don't think that tells much. Month might be more interesting in terms of a trend.

Do note that the API generates a lot of false data. You'll see spikes for instance in my graphs which are caused by their API accidently flipping a lot of players to "online" when they aren't online and other weird things. If you hover over the line segments in my graphs it'll say the peak number of players for "all".

[Calista]

My complements on your work but I have a request. Would it be possible to assign values to the y-axis on the most current sampling? Just like you have it on the left side would be great on the right side of the graph.

[Hirvox]

There's something wrong with the formatting of the graph. All of the X-axis labels are cut off right after the month name, so they're pretty much useless. And if I scroll left to earlier months, even labels in May get cut off.
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