Preceding Double XP, the late-April high was 17,348 on April 26. A little over a month later, the highs were steadily moving lower, and that is while including the lift from the Double XP residual player counts.
Over the last few days, RS3 retested the floor, but it did not break lower than previous lows. Thursday, June 4, averaged 14,988, slightly above the prior Thursday low of 14,821. June 5 averaged 15,282, barely below the prior Friday's 15,309. Then June 7 came in at 16,988, slightly above the prior Sunday at 16,673.
Not to be too optimistic, but it looks like a slowing bleed and perhaps a small bounce is occurring.
Two other data points suggest the counts have found equilibrium.
Weekly hiscores activity also seems to be stabilizing after a post-Double XP drop. Week 20 was 117,453, week 21 was 111,966, week 22 was 110,670, and the current week is 107,232 with one more day to accumulate counts. So while the current week is 10K lower, the subsequent declines after Double XP have been small, roughly at a 1K difference, and I do expect tomorrow that we will likely close out above the prior week, maybe even the two prior weeks.
| Week | Accounts | Change |
|---|---|---|
| May 13 (W20) | 117,453 | -11,276 |
| May 20 (W21) | 111,966 | -5,487 |
| May 27 (W22) | 110,670 | -1,296 |
| Jun 3 (W23) | 107,232 | -3,438 |
The member counts from the hiscores page show the same direction. From May 15 to May 28, the member counts were losing about 518 per day. From June 4 to June 8, they were losing about 238 per day.
| Period | Start | End | Change | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 15-May 28 | 443,810 | 437,076 | -6,734 | -518/day |
| Jun 4-Jun 8 | 434,309 | 433,357 | -952 | -238/day |
All of these data indicate stabilization.
What has been odd is that while the highs have been melting like a mound of snow, the lows have been far more resilient, abnormally so.
In off-peak hours, players are not leaving the game at the same average rate that players in peak hours are. At least recently. In fact, off-peak hours have shown increases in size over the 30-day average at some hours.
So, what could be causing this? Are there any new servers? None that I could find. What explanation for this trend could there be? I went around to F2P worlds looking at normal botting locations. It was not long before I found two different bot farms. Here is one below:
Over the weekend, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole searching through different botting locations. I found a Mining Guild bot farm, a dwarven stout bot farm, and maybe some other one-offs. Most of these bots had the same name pattern: three consonants followed by a bunch of numbers, something like AAA12345.
When you expect to see seasonality or weekly harmonics, and those trends are being abnormally violated in a way that should not be, there is a good chance that you are seeing a bot farm in action.
This is one of the reasons why it would be good to have world data for RS3 because we could see which worlds show abnormal fluctuations at odd hours, and that could point to where bot farms are operating.
I took screenshots of the bot farms, much like the stack seen in the picture above, and then came back later to see if any of them were still operating. I will say that within hours, many of these bots were banned.
Botting aside, I do think the player counts have found the floor.
We are entering the historical pattern I previously called the doldrums: a flat period with a little uplift near the end of June and another uplift near the end of July. I still do not expect to see explosive, higher population numbers, but we are experiencing stabilization.
This is a good sign that player counts will increase following historical patterns.