Board Game Arena

Why the sudden jump in players connected and playing on BGA?

Looking at the service status over the last couple days I'm seeing numbers significantly higher than normal. I don't normally see numbers higher than 30k for players connected and suddenly it's over 50k.

I'm not seeing any new releases with player counts accounting for the increase.

I have been curious about this as well! There are BGA groups on other social media that are stating if you aren’t a premium member you can’t access the site right now due to the number of players online. I wonder what’s going on!

I also would like to know why the sudden serious increase in players online and playing. Just 1 month we were just starting to hit 30k on 23k playing. 2 weeks later 40k on 30k playing. Today I wake up 56k on 42k playing. Where are all these games playing. I have 305 games in favorites and can't notice any difference in players and games trying to start. Seen increase of 15k in just the last 3 days. Why? Be nice if they were players and system could handle it. Maybe they now have an ad running on many other apps. And the commercials for those game apps is now Bga.

https://boardgamearena.com/serverstatus ... ves_played

Don't see any upward trend or a jump in these stats though, so what is going on lol

Wow. Right now. 62k online. 38k playing. That is a 20k increase of players online in last 2 days. And usually there is not 24k not playing. Is this part of the testing to see if servers can handle. Are these bots ?

yodamus wrote: ↑30 January 2025, 20:56 Wow. Right now. 62k online. 38k playing. That is a 20k increase of players online in last 2 days. And usually there is not 24k not playing. Is this part of the testing to see if servers can handle. Are these bots ?

The graphs for number of games played and time spent by players have stayed constant over the last month or so.

Therefore I would guess that you are correct, it is some sort of stress / bot test.

I wonder if it is because they are forcing people to authenticate in order to browse these forums. I used to be able to go to https://forum.boardgamearena.com/ in an incognito window, but it now gives an error message, so now I have to log in to do it.

I understand there is a BGA app for non-iphone users. It keeps them logged in. I noticed this week that I have on average 15 friends "online", but they really aren't. I wonder if this is causing the increase in numbers?

In the past few days, there was a shift in how we identified people who were disconnected, which is why you may have seen some pals online when they weren't.

This was resolved a few hours ago.

Thanks for the explanation. No wonder most of those were not actually playing. Keep up the great work.