Steam not counting player activity since April

I'm not sure why people are ignoring this but Vladimir has been trying go show everyone that Steam had changed everyone's user settings to private a few months ago. Which means there is the appearance of people leaving the game and not tracking everyone joining or playing after the launch.

Here is the article:

http://www.shacknews.com/article/10...fectively-render-steamspy-steamcharts-useless

 

Is this down to the EU privacy thing that was brought in recently?

 

It hides which games you own.

This is personal data. How many are playing a game is not affected, since this data is anonymized.

We could see in steamspy how many people actually had it installed. Thats no longer possible/reliable.

 

Apparently you have to go into your settings and change it so that it doesn't show you are private.

 

I found this article floating around our guild discord but I am on vacation so I have not looked into it further. Thought I would at least share the article here though.

 

Yeah again this has nothing to do with player counts just with peoples libraries. How many people playing is and always will be public data. https://store.steampowered.com/stats/Steam-Game-and-Player-Statistics?l=english

 

This is not true.

Side-by-side comparisons:

Spoiler: Fallout 4 vs. Shroud of the Avatar

Spoiler: Town of Salem vs. Shroud of the Avatar

There is no such settings in my Steam Client.

 

Profile, Privacy Settings, Game Details, Set to Public.

 

But... but..... the negative social engineered reviews! It can only be those people's fault!

 

I see what you guys are saying. Thank you for the responses.

 

This might only affect certain regions too, because mine was not changed at all, everything is public and always has been, I am in Canada if that makes a difference.

But as others have pointed out, it only hides your library not players playing games

 

I will send this information along, thank you.

 

Is there some way to find Shroud there?

I found the settings in mine and Viola and turned them public. We aren't saying that there is no data, but that you now have to opt in. I've been doing some extra digging to find out if I was wrong about concurrency numbers being part of the hidden data. I'll post more when I find out.

 

Update:

Concurrent users is correct, everything else is hazy.

And they would appreciate us opting in to help with that other data.

But that means you don't have to for us to see users in Steamcharts, and those didn't suffer from this situation.

 

The achievement data for SoTA is correct too. Sadly it appears 80% of people who play on steam didn't even make it far enough to kill 10 monsters.

 

Well, yes, but personaly, I always played on steam, killed many thousands monsters and I did not even unlocked one achievement. It could be because of a bug, to be honest.

 

I think most achievements r bugged

 

Also the case that Im always telling everyone to use the non steam patcher as its just better these days, many more swap off steam to play the game than swap to it now. I never use it anymore as its too damn long patching.

 

I just had to do the reverse as the R55 patches have been an issue on my system (bugging out when installing then restarting patching from 0 -> 79X or 800 (a nice 7 gig download) and then if I'm REALLY lucky tells me I don't have enough space (I have over 300 gig free on a 500 gig SSD)), So now I'm running through Steam for the time being, however, that has the nice side effect of ramping up RAM usage.

 

Surprise nobody has done a poll asking what launcher is used.