A Study of Player Activity

This dispatch will be looking into when players most often join the game with new nations, and when there is a relative drought of incoming players using the medium of the Economic Output stat.

As the game tells us on looking at it's stat page, "Older nations, with higher populations, were noted to have a distinct advantage." In other words, the economic output of a nation will travel almost exclusively up throughout its lifespan. Here are some pretty graphs from my nation and one of the top world nations showing that.

Given that Economic Output is only going up for existing nations, we can deduce that a drop in the world average Economic Output can only be caused by an influx of new nations, or very powerful ones ceasing to exist. For the sake of this study, we will be ignoring the ability to cease to exist. Using this information, upon looking at a graph of the world average, a drop in the graph means an influx of new nations, and the graph increasing sharper than where it does for the majority of the graph would mean not many new nations are being made.

(Nation used as a base is Danationmetropolis2)

Withing the past two years of NS, as of this dispatch being posted, the world average Economic Output has had significant increases in May to August 2018 and at the same time in 2019. Slight drops happened in the two month period after each of these increases. Also interesting, there was a slight bump in December and January of 2018/19.

This gives me an impression that the game is strongly tied to the American school year (I don't know how other countries match up), with players on from September to June, and off over the summer. The winter bump can be explained by people taking time off for the holidays.