I once again decided to make a post on Reddit about RS3 player counts going up. Oh boy.
A bit of history: six months ago, I made a post about player counts going down. People flipped out. "There's no way player counts could be going down." "You are wrong." "You're manipulating the data." "You're lying with data."
I think I'll be putting together a TikTok of all the detractors from my post with Billy from Predator laughing at the end every time I turn out to be right.
My new post saying people are returning to the game currently has around 786 upvotes and 197k views.
It also attracted a predictable group of detractors: people coping and trying to deflect the point behind some methodological error that "I'm making." Somebody said, "The rise in player counts is a brief bounce." Somebody said I should only be looking at hiscore totals. Somebody said another site has month-over-month indicators and mine doesn't, so I'm wrong. I was told that my own data did not support what I was saying.
This is cope from people who don't understand how to read charts and don't understand statistics. And it's fine if you don't understand. Part of my job is to make insights accessible to you. That's one of the reasons I made changes to my website today to add month-over-month and year-over-year benchmarks. If that's something that you find valuable, you now have it.
But there's also a fundamental error occurring here that needs to be addressed. People are confusing magnitude with directionality. We don't need 13 years of benchmarks to see that a trend has reversed and is continuing to accelerate in its own right.
We can simply look at the direction of the trend.
In essence: max count higher, low count higher, number go up.
Long-term game trends
A lot of things were attributed to me about the magnitude of the increase and the long-term health of the game.
Nobody knows the answer to where the game is headed. No one, not even Jagex.
What I can tell you right now is that people are returning to the game.
Based on historical trends, normal player seasonality, and the content coming throughout the fall, player counts will probably increase quite dramatically over the next month or two and then probably flatten until December.
That's my best guess.
Magnitude is not directionality
Saying player counts are up only 4% month-over-month does not disprove an upward trend. It assumes the count is already at its peak or that it's a one-time insubstantial amount for some arbitrary reason.
The better question would be whether the slopes are positive and whether comparable days and months are improving. And right now, the answer is definitively yes, which tells us the game is no longer in a decline or flat period.
Month-over-month is a bad benchmark for RS3
RS3 has so much seasonality and so many weekly player rhythms that no month will be identical to the one before it. There's no reason to assume that one month should be up because the previous month was up. One month could be up, the next month could be down, and the following month could be up.
If we want a benchmark, we should be looking at the same day of the week this year versus last year.
This helps us rule out seasonality and shows us what happened at this exact expected point.
Now, while RS3 is down from this point last year, it is closing that gap. And that is the point.
It's going up.