Mineplex Server Stats [Year in Review]

Hiya! This is a continuation of @Evgeen's thread, so be sure to check it out here if you haven't already.

What is this thread about?
Some of you might have already seen discussions about the reputation of Mineplex in recent years. Numerous arguments of this kind end up in phrases like "Mineplex is dead" – a sentiment that you might encounter fairly common around these parts; not only on the forums, but also on other social platforms and in-game. I was curious to find out how the server actually performed, so here are a few charts for you to form your own opinion.

Please note that the decision to start gathering these metrics was more or less spontaneous, so some numbers from early 2020 might be missing. Additionally, I was obviously not going to collect these numbers on every single day of the year; so I'd like to thank @feat for helping me out with collecting stats.

Player count
This is easily one of the most important topics for any server management team – not only because it reflects player feedback towards updates and changes, but also because it is a vital metric for making sure the community is in a healthy state. With a smaller community, there's a risk some gamemodes might not perform well. Long-time community members might have noticed this before: When Mineplex replaced their classic UHC mode with 4 separate UHC games (Speed Solo, Speed Teams, Solo and Teams), it split up the community to a point where games were only rarely starting. With this year's reintroduction of UHC – a highly requested game – this mistake was fortunately avoided.

This year has been an exceptional one for all of us. As you can imagine, the pandemic situation has led to a sizeable increase in interest throughout the entertainment industry (at least for online services), and Mineplex is no exception to this. As soon as many countries around the world issued a lockdown or other restrictions in March, the player count has immediately doubled from an average of 2000 to more than 4000 players. I was absolutely not expecting this when I started collecting these numbers, but realistically speaking, nobody could've seen THIS coming, right?!

While other servers (and even Mojang) faced problems with the sudden increase in demand, Mineplex remained relatively stable throughout summer, with few exceptions. You might notice some spikes in the chart here and there – these were most likely caused by outages around other services. Mineplex hit this year's record on April 28, where over 9550 players were online at the same time.

For the remainder of the year, the player count continued to be relatively stable from anywhere between 2k to 3k players. This indicates that while Mineplex may not have had ideal player retention, the interest in the server right now is much larger than it was during the beginning of the year – which is great news for all community and staff members (I'll explain why later).

Immortal subscriptions
Similarly to the chart above, the number of active Immortal subscriptions has seen immense growth this year. This is for a variety of reasons though: For one, we're living in the worst timeline where a pandemic can bring everything to a halt in an instant. However, it is also important to consider that the Immortal rank was only introduced this year to replace the previous Power Play Club subscription. As such, it received great support in terms of updates, with new perks being added both in-game, on the forums and on Discord.

With all of that said, we are looking at a six-fold growth this year. Starting at a measly 512 subscriptions before the launch of the Immortal rank, it has received support from almost 3300 players back in September, a number that might be hit again soon.

Mineplex has offered great incentives for subscribing to the rank, and it seems that it paid off. While there are few reasons for unsubscribing (mainly losing interest), more and more perks are being added over time – and perhaps there is even more to come.

Of course, the Immortal rank and its subsequent updates has been met with a lot of negative feedback as well, which I felt like was worth mentioning here. Regardless, it has certainly been a success for the server and supported its growth over recent months.

Soo... what now?

Well, that comes down to you. Whether you might be sceptical of the recent developments and expect a decline to be around the corner, or you're excited about the progress of this year and can't wait to see what the future holds, there's certainly more than one valid opinion. Feel free to comment what you think, if you'd like.

One thing is for sure though: With the increased resources coming from both the Immortal subscriptions and the larger player count, this server is in a good spot to face the next year, with more updates and additions coming soon. This year has seen countless new staff members as well as several new developers joining the team, so the future does look bright in my opinion. Should you not be aware, a new game is also confirmed to be in development, so who knows what we might end up with next year

Aaand that's about it! Again, this was more of an experiment than anything, so I am not planning to keep this up for the next year. However, the results might still be insightful for someone who would like to learn more about the server's history, so I will be adding these charts and other statistics to the Mineplex Wiki.

If you're curious about how GWEN is performing, feel free to give this thread a read (although it's somewhat outdated already, haha).

Here's to a great 2021 – happy new year everybody

 

Hi!

Definitely not late reply but anyway, thanks for creating such thread! That's really cool graphs showing player count & Immortal subscription. I really wasn't aware that you were preparing something like that until you posted it but that's cool that you made kinda a continuation of my thread.

We have had several peaks of online in 2020 which is so cool to see and some of them I don't recall for whatever reason but cool that we managed to get that. Looking forward what 2021 will show to use in terms of online on the network.

I appreciate all affords which you put into creating that which was even harder work than I did. Thanks for creating it!

(make sure to check my thread as well)

 

Thanks for the lovely feedback everyone!

Ooooh, that's definitely one of my favourites for 2020 as well! Seeing so many ex-staff members making their way back onto the team was certainly exciting.

It's been great catching up with everyone from back in the day, and I feel like if anything, the pandemic has made that a lot easier. Friendships last forever, as they say, hm? :)

 

Incredible data + representation! Very nicely done! Is there any information about other ranks as well?

 

Have you correlated these trends with updates? Curious about the responses to changes made.

 

Good point! For Immortals, I was able to go off their in-game community, which conveniently has a member count representing the number of active subscriptions. It probably won't be as easy to take other ranks into consideration, but you might have a chance when it comes to staff ranks (if you let that count). Maybe that'd be something to consider for 2021? haha

I was planning to, actually, but it seems there haven't been many "major" updates that would change the player count long term. The most noticeable events were definitely the beginning of the pandemic and occasional game updates, but on the grand scale of things, you might not be able to find a correlation based on this graph alone.

You might get some better results if you consider a moving average though, so I might just try doing that later.

Yep, that's definitely important to emphasize. I guess we'll see what they come up with over the next few months ;o

 

Thanks I’m a data nerd so I like to play around with all of this

 

The only issue I see is the typical Java vs Bedrock. A dedicated team to either would lead to issues with the other.

 

Here you go, then :)

As promised, I've updated the chart to include a moving average. This should reflect the player count more accurately – as you've seen, the previous version was skewed on weekends and when other servers went down.

I still question whether game updates had any meaningful effect on the graph, but you might notice a temporary increase around the time the Halloween update was released. This certainly shows that Mineplex's halloween and christmas games still are the most popular events of the year ;o

 

That’s a real cool and effective way to showcase this year! The graphs are very informative, and it really is quite amazing to see the times where he server was most popular, least popular, and how the community feels about immortal subscriptions!