Before I start with this, I want you guys to direct your discussions/debates regarding population judgments to the proper population discussion page.
https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/forums/6e35355aecdf4fd0acdaee3cc4156fd4/topics/halo-5-population-discussion-thread/f56a5d71-6ec3-4df8-99dd-2ead7d16b5fd/posts
I’m NOT promoting that page, but that’s where this type of discussion goes, and I don’t want this topic locked from you guys because I believe this should be its own topic that is easy to navigate, relatively short in terms of pages and organization, as well as easy for me to edit and for others to see my changes without being buried in pages of posts. Please only provide feedback or discussion about my methodology and calculations, as that will help me refine my methods so that my outcomes are more accurate. If you want to debate about this, please go to the referred location.
I have seen a lot of debate between the population counts for Halo 5 multiplayer, and I would encourage you to educate yourself and take the time to read over this data that I have compiled and calculated to put an end to this debate. The information that I am about to present is in no way 100% accurate, as that would defeat the purpose of this being just an estimate. If anyone would like to address any issues with my calculations or methods, than please, by all means, provide some constructive feedback. If you don’t want to read any of my work, you can scroll all the way down to see my results.
This method will only provide me with so much information to work with due to the secrecy of online player populations with most of these games. I will try my best to make due with what I have, but the result will not be 100% precise. I’m rounding the population counts, as they do not stay at one consistent value. What I had originally planned was to calculate the average decrease in online population with the directly proportional decrease in ranking on the xbox one store through the Most Played category. For instance, rank 1 to rank 2 may have a –20% population change, rank 3-4 has a –40% population change(not actually verified, just an example). The average being –30% population change. Then apply the –X% to the game just above Halo 5, and +X% to the game just below Halo 5, then average the two. Unfortunately I couldn’t use this method due to the lack of information. I tried, but there was too much model breakdown. So I’m going to be using exponential regression instead. Which is going to be slightly less accurate, but it should give a relatively smooth estimate.
As a disclosure: I am providing this data so that others may judge if the game is stable, or if this population is weak or dying. Those are the two sides I have observed. I am not presenting any bias here. I will go into my view points later after receiving some feedback.
I shall begin.
The number one played game online for the Xbox One is currently Call of Duty: Black Ops III.
Population: ~265,000 (http://i.imgur.com/BQquYk0.jpg) 1/14/2016
Rank 2-7 do not have any known player counts that I could find.
Rank 8: Battlefront EA
Population: ~70,000(peak)(http://swbstats.com/) as of 1/16/2016
Two points will suffice for this model, but if anyone knows the population count for any other game in the top played xbox one games, I would like to hear it and see your source, for which I will then recalculate and edit this post using those additional values to get an even more accurate model for Halo 5’s population.
f(r) represents the population change to be inversely proportional to r. It is inversely proportional rather than directly because making a model that started at 10 would look odd. r is the ranking
f(r) r
{265,000, 0}
{ 70,000, 8}
^hopefully that doesn’t look sloppy when this actually gets posted
Now I will use exponential regression, as a linear model can not make an accurate prediction for this circumstance. Model breakdown will occur very quickly.
Outcome:
in the form y = a(b^x)
a ~ 265,000
b ~ 0.8467
Inputting this information into a proper exponential formula for f(r):
f(r) = 265,000(0.8467^r)
At this point I have looked at Halo 5’s ranking on the Xbox One and noticed it is no longer top 10 (as of 1/16/2016), so I will assume that the website list is accurate enough for this calculation, and that rank 11 is reasonable to its position.
Plugging in the information:
f(r) = 265,000(0.8467^11)
f(r) = 265,000(.1603)
f(r) ~ 42,488
So what this outcome shows us is that there are approximately 42,488 players in Halo 5.
I will let you guys decide what you want to do with this information. And please, if anyone has a better way of approximating the population, I’m all ears for it.