I think it would be nice to be able to see the daily traffic statistics of the website and/or the servers. Essentially, this would be a graph that shows how much activity occurs by time of day or day of the week. Overall server analytics and/or website analytics would allow people to see when EMC gets the most traffic. This makes it easier to time things like bumping posts, creating auctions, and doing in-game advertising so that they will get the most views. Individual server traffic analytics would allow players to more easily separate into servers based on the time of most activity. For example, if I am a new player or just looking for a new SMP to call my home, I can look to see which SMP has the most active players at the time when I am online most frequently. Then, instead of accidentally joining a server where everyone plays at 9pm when I go to bed, I can join the SMP with its peak activity closest to the time that I play. This is really just an expansion of the severs-overview feature to include a temporal graph. I'm currently using excel to try and determine the server's daily traffic trends manually and it's rather tedious and biased.
Possibly, but plenty of other server websites do this. And the real-time activity of each SMP can already be viewed here.
Website traffic is definitely different than normal in-game traffic. This is something I'd need to pull Aikar to accomplish, though I have ran a survey in the past to have players self-identify when they are online and we use that when determining large event hosting times. If a forum master wants to find the post I shared that in, that would help. Edit: Here is website traffic for the last 30 days, darker blue means more online. These times are EMC-1, so if it says 4 pm, it's actually 5 pm EMC time.
That graph is pretty much exactly what I was thinking. I wonder if you could just make a program to take periodic snapshots of the server population that would allow you to make a graph like this for each SMP? Just a thought. Also, thanks for posting that. You just saved me a lot of time lol.
The graph I posted is website traffic, through good ol' google analytics. For in-game traffic, access to the database to pull data would be needed and that requires Aikar. With his current focus being the 1.14 update, this is not something that will be done anytime soon.
