Last night in the IRC channel we started talking about players and where everyone comes from. It came up because of an in game announcement that the servers would be going down, but the time was given in Pacific Standard Time. That's a little silly for the Phoenix server where most players are from Europe.

It's even sillier when we all know there is a good portion of the gamer population who can't figure out when the event times are because they either don't know what time zone they live in, or can't figure out what GMT means. How are these people going to figure out PST?

I use Google Analytics to track how many readers are coming to the blog and since The Great Acclaim Scam Event the numbers of readers here has doubled. A couple of months ago, in any 30 day period we would get 750 to 800 unique readers. That idea of "unique readers" is important, at least for me. Even though I check the blog a few times per day for the comments section, I only count as 1 unique reader for the whole month.

Since that Acclaim Scam Event we're now regularly getting 1400+ unique readers and depending on Hyperion, and whether or not he's done something silly lately, that can be 1500+ for 30 days. I can change the time range too, and since this time last September we've had 9126 unique viewers, who have looked at over 100k blog posts. This blog provides information to a lot more people than just the 25 or so active players we have in our league!

So where do those people come from? By country the top 25 countries make up 87% of all the unique readers, and only 13% come from the USA, Canada or Brazil. These look like significant numbers and probably represent the 9Dragons player base fairly well. Someone could argue that this blog is for Bardo/Phoenix players, but I would point out that 10% of our players on Bardo/Phoenix are not American. Also, a fair number of Europeans play on Asura/Yin for the Player vs Player part of the game.

Anyway, here's the list. This is where the players come from.