Due to recent questions about how "active runners" are defined, and also my previous definition is no longer correct, I decided to check and determine the definition for active runners once again. I don't know if the logic was changed recently, or if I did a mistake when trying to determine the logic previously, but whatever. Here is the current (correct) logic, at least while writing this post.
There are 2 counters for active runners:
Games list:
If you sort the games list by "most active" or "least active", you will see an active runners count for each game. This is the number of players that submitted at least one full-game run in the last 30 days. The number ignores IL runs.
Game statistics page:
In the "Statistics" page for each game, you can see a number next to the field "Number of currently active players". This name is misleading, as it has a completely different and unique logic from the previous counter. A more appropriate name would be "activity score".
The logic for the score is as follows: Each runner on the leaderboard gets a score between 0 and 1, based on the time elapsed since their most recent run (either full-game or IL run). This time is based on the "date" field, not submission or verification dates.
If the runner submits a run that happened right now, the score is 1. That score is gradually going down to 0 over the course of 100 days, with diminishing rate. A runner that has not submitted any run in the last 100 days, will get a score of 0.
Then, the score of all runners is added together to a total sum of activity scores, and then this number is round up to the ceiling integer. If you hover with the cursor on the number next to "Number of currently active players", you will see a tooltip with the exact total score before the rounding.
Runs without a video:
Interestingly, if the recent run of the runner doesn't contain an embedded video, the score is halved (starts from 0.5, and gradually going down to 0 after 100 days). That includes:
- Runs with no video link at all, in leaderboards that allow this
- Runs with an external link that is not embedded on the site (like YouTube or Twitch); those links can be for linking to a picture, a video in un-notable sites, Google Drive links, or something else.
Formula for the activity score:
I checked the activity score of several runs based on the time elapsed since the date of the run until today, and put it into a polynomial interpolation calculator. I can't know the exact formula, and I won't show here the 7-degree polynomial I found that seems to give a perfect fit, but a friendly approximation to the formula would be:
Score = 0.0001 X^2 - 0.02 X + 1 (Where X is the total days elapsed from the date of the run)
As I said, for runs without an embedded video the score is halved, so an approximation to their score is:
Score = 0.00005 X^2 - 0.01 X + 0.5
This is how the approximation formula looks like:
"If you sort the games list by "most active" or "least active", you will see an active runners count for each game. This is the number of players that submitted at least one full-game run in the last 30 days. The number ignores IL runs."
Seems a bit odd to exclude IL runs, especially considering that some leaderboards are primarily based around ILs.
I also gotta say that the "scoring system" for active players on the statistics page is... interesting to say the least. I really wonder why they would opt to use such a complex formula rather than just counting players that have submitted runs recently, like the value on the games list. At the very least they probably shouldn't call it "Number of currently active players" since that's not exactly what the number represents; it would be more appropriate to just call it "activity score" or something like that, imo.
@Xarxos You and I think alike. I complained about that in the feedback thread, some weeks ago. Both for the exclusion of IL runs in the games page, and the weird score system that is still called "number of active runners". (I also wrote above that the name "activity score" is better)