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Website is moved

I have just finished moving the website, from the old location (on a sub website of mine) to the new one, complete with a domain of its own. Everything seems to be working fine right now, but if you notice something strange, you know what’s going on. I’ll do a few more tests later to find out if there’s any rough edge that needs to be fixed.

This entry was posted Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 8:14 am and is filed under General. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “Website is moved”

  1. RosOne Says:
    January 19th, 2007 at 8:42 am

    Great move! Finally a proper domain :]

  2. garry Says:
    January 19th, 2007 at 10:02 am

    Did Gamespy remove my mod from their stats page?

    On this one..

    http://www.onlinegamingzeitgeist.com/graphs/mods(1111)_2_players.png

    I think the light blue one is Garry’s Mod. But gamespy be hatin’.

  3. Zeh Says:
    January 19th, 2007 at 10:27 am

    Hey Garry,

    The blue line is gmod10 indeed. It’s also not listing the mod on GameSpy’s page:

    http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/mods.asp?id=1111&s=1

    So it’s never featured on the graphs anymore.

    I have three theories:

    1. GameSpy has a limit for mods listed per game, listing only the top 10, and gmod10 isn’t being featured on the list enough because it only counts multiplayer users (10th has around 44 players);

    2. The master server that GameSpy uses for HL2 servers is deficient and it’s ignoring a bunch of servers;

    3. GameSpy be hatin’.

    Right now, gmod10 is listing 66 players (multiplayer only) on Steam’s server list, so I guess it’s a mix of options 1 and 2.

    PS. Damn this auto-link that doesn’t work with parenthesis.

  4. garry Says:
    January 19th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

    My guess is number 3. According to the stats I have GMod10 hasn’t had under 200 players since release (I think you were probably looking at gmod9 on Valve’s list).

    If the blue line is GMod then it was obviously working.. until someone made it not work. Or am I being paranoid.

  5. Zeh Says:
    January 19th, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    I wasn’t looking at steampowered.com, but really just browsing the server list on my steam client, filtering by the only “Garry’s Mod” I have installed (which is gmod10). I actually summed the number of players I saw online to reach that number.

    Regardless, Steampowered.com own stats always shows many more players on their stats page. My theory is that it does so because it lists all players authenticated by the system – multiplayer, singleplayer, lan or wan. Even when I was only getting 66 people listed on servers (again, inside Steam), on steampowered.com, on the other hand, gmod9 was listing a bit more than 200 people, and gmod10 was listing around 500 people (I checked before posting).

    For a comparison, gmod10 now is listing around 773 people on steampowered.com stats, and 469 servers; however, on the server browser, inside steam, it’s listing 137 players, and 52 servers (with no other filter, no firewall/peerguardian blocking, etc).

    So while it’s still strange that it is never featured on GameSpy’s modspage for HL2 anymore (still not listing now for example), I really think one must look at the steampowered.com numbers as being an indicative of players over Steam as a whole, not online players on servers that can be joined. I have no doubt gmod10 has had at least 200 players enjoying it at anytime, but whether or not they’re on public, online servers (passworded or otherwise) is the real question… and that’s what GameSpy (and consequently this website) aims to measure.

    So I don’t know, maybe asking Valve and/or writing to GameSpy can help solve this mistery. I guess I should actually ask valve what steampowered.com measures… now GameSpy, well, they never reply to my emails anyways. :/

  6. garry Says:
    January 19th, 2007 at 1:49 pm

    The page on Steampowered definitiely only shows multiplayer clients. It might show LAN too, I’m not sure. But if maxplayers is 1 then they don’t get shown on that page (Valve gives me access to the # of players currently playing, mp and sp).

    I’d be more inclined to take the ingame results with a pinch of salt. I always thought the server that serves that list only sends you the most appropriate ones for you rather than the whole list.

    Either way, GMod10 still has more players than some of the games that ARE shown on that pic..

  7. Tom Edwards Says:
    January 20th, 2007 at 6:28 am

    The server browser definitely doesn’t return all servers. I noticed a huge increase when I switched router, and I’ve never seen an Asian game even on an unfiltered and reverse-ping sorted list.

  8. Zeh Says:
    January 20th, 2007 at 8:28 am

    Hm, I didn’t think of that. Could be.

    Anyhow, I’ve never imagined GameSpy’s stats to be completely reliable, but with this and a few other issues, they seem to be doing pretty bad as of lately. I think analysis based on it still stands, but the error margin is too big and as a consequence games with a small online share suffer from it.

    With CSports.net in an endless coma, a good substitute for GameSpy should be game-monitor.com. For example, it shows 343 players for “garrysmod2” (I guess this is gmod10?) right now:

    http://www.game-monitor.com/GameSearch/garrysmod2/garrysmod.html

    Steampowered.com shows 861 players/545 servers.

    It also has this page which is pretty straightforward:
    http://www.game-monitor.com/othergames.php?page=search

    The only semi-issue is that it classifies everything as “games”… ie, with no separation between mods and such. Which is actually fine, in most aspects, but it means it goes against the way I classify data on this website… ie, GameSpy’s website automatically takes new games and mods as they are released, and on the latter case, even if they’re not added to their database first.

    Because of this, and because of the fact that differences in number would cause some massive difference between the current graph and a new one, it’s not feasible to simply start reading game-monitor.com stats. But it’s something to think about in the future. Although I believe it’s easier for them to implement something like that themselves, being that the page is actually created with statistics in mind instead of just listing the simplest numbers related to the game (ie, they have graphics for the number of servers and players for the last month and such).

    There are other issues, like game-monitor having a much smaller number of players for certain games. BF2, for example, is 24501 players on GameSpy, and 19913 on game-monitor; BF2142 have similar difference ratios. They’re small, within a certain error margin… however, Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory has 15154 players on GameSpy, and 1404 players on game-monitor!

    Well, food for thought (at least for me). But right now I fear no unique third-party source will ever be reliable. The only real solution seem to be to have a customized solution centered on my own server (with as many public servers listed as possible), one that would query all servers by itself. And this I can’t do; this is just a website hosted on a shared server and this would be way beyond the scope of my hosting plans.

  9. LeadS Says:
    February 10th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    Seems like your stats are not updated since january. Something broken?

  10. Zeh Says:
    February 10th, 2007 at 10:30 am

    LeadS: yep, I noticed that a few days ago. The website itself isn’t broken, it’s a issue with GameSpy stats, but I’ll make a post concerning that.

This website gathers data for various First Person Shooter games for PCs, and then build graphics with those numbers. This brings no answers, just questions. Where do we go from here?