I feel like I’ve noticed a large drop in players in the Salamander Wiz-Den server. I could just be noticing things that didn’t actually happen.
Delta V let me be a felinid.. and even though i dislike the gameplay enviroment of it more…I do love being a cat girl.. :3
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There is some whitelists in the pipeline right now (including mine), so i guess it means some new players will be coming soon
You made me curious if it what you observed was real or just a bias, so I looked up the data from grafana.
This data is a moving average over 24 hours and the player count varies a lot over the day due to time zones and most players being from the US.
If I did not mess up the query somehow, then we got a sudden decrease in player numbers since the end of march.
Other servers seem to be unaffected though
I don’t want to make any wild assumptions if anything caused it or if it is just random fluctuations over the year. I just hope we did not scare everyone away with our april fools event 
I wonder if the drop in players collolates with the ammount of vulp players, they was extremely popular during the event and are being blocked by the race freeze, much like how I started on Delta V to play a felinid maybe others went to other severs to play Vulps.
Salamander has gone through many, many things. If you want a good summary, you can read my previous comments about it here.
TL:DR: Mander goes through a player cycle.
About every few months, the population that’s there slowly gets fed up in some way, shape, form or fashion. Maybe they’re tired that the playerbase is declining in RP quality. Maybe it’s just the lack of content. Maybe their friends or whatever aren’t there anymore. Maybe they don’t enjoy MRP anymore. The short of it, is that players generally just leave after a long time, and a new population comes in and replaces that.
Players go everywhere. Some decide that MRP isn’t for them, and embrace LRP chaos like Goobstation or otherwise. Some fall even deeper in love with roleplay, and move towards HRP forks like Cosmatic Drift and Sector Umbra. Some decide that maybe SS14’s base gameplay isn’t for them, and they move to forks like Frontier Station, Monolith, or RMC-14. Some think that Mander’s community is just really bad, and they move towards more tightly-knitted communities like Harmony or Moffstation. And of course there’s everyone in between that decides to bounce around between everywhere.
I call it the cosine wave of Mander. I remember the days when Mander was around 30-50 players (the sweet spot as I’ve said before) around 9-12 PM PST. Then it was literally always full at 80/80. And now it’s deadpop at times.
I’ve always stuck behind whenever a playerbase exodus happened. It’s starting to get pretty predictable as to what happens. I’ve just generally accepted it as the circle of life.
Usually new players would fill the pool, however whitelist applications are being picked up after the primary admin that was doing them went on vacation. Though I suspect that roleplay quality will drop when that hits, as there’s not really any huge veteran players on there persistently as of right now.
I can generally show you the state of popularity Mander’s been.
Here’s the past week of mander playcount:
The past week, about 3 months ago (notice how there’s more bulk in the graph around when everyone plays mid-day):
And about mid-december of last year:
Unfortunately the data literally ends there so I can’t show you how it was like around Apr 2024.
But generally, it follows a loop.
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there is also things like exams to consider, here in the UK we’re moving towards the end of our academic year so many in higher education dont have as much free time to play the game, Im not sure if the US side is also in exam season.
this is interesting stuff! Ive been playing mander since about january of this year and its where i have most of my hours on a character called mothew! I think i must have joined after the so called dark age of mander where the great lrp exodus happened or i just took a break on accident but i do really feel the “people get whitelisted and treat it like lrp” point. I’ve taken multiple breaks from the game when just suddenly the quality of my rounds and roleplay will just take a sharp decline, and im about 100 percent sure it must have been on days where new peeps got whitelisted and just played it was lrp.
Ive also tried other servers: funky, delta v, frontier, rmc, goob yet i always end up coming back to sala just because the community there i feel is better than those servers and the rules make more sense.
But yeah, i do wish sala had a few more player ideally at all times due to me living in england, my “peak play time” is at a different time from Americans so i usually wont see the 50-60 sweet point that i like.
All that data aside.
People… Most users that play SS13 and ss14 are gown ups with families and kids… It`s middle of SUMMER. Like common
P.S. Its also peak work time for blue collars, i give this summer 7 overloaded consumer line transformers out of 10
I’m a Salamander main since about March. I mainly play command roles (by vertue of simply having them set to low.) And got worn out by the end of round ooc malding or by having yo set up enginnering as captain or HoS because there were zero engi crew. I fully intend to come back, just been spending the last few weeks taking a break.
I love Salamander, i love the community and I love the higher quality of roleplay vs LRP. Though I don’t see players “playing like LRP” as a bad thing. I assume they just transfered from Lizard and need to be shown what high quality RP looks like.
I tell all my friends to get whitelisted and to play on Salamander all the time.
Been maining Salamander pretty hard since February, since about May I started actively exploring other MRP servers just out of curiosity. Overall just started finding other servers with a more consistent player base during my active hours (evenings/nights in CST typically have 30 or less population) which Mander just doesn’t have at the moment. Rotating playerbase based on whitelisting waves definitely affects my perception of the server (especially as a Sec main) and the somewhat weaker feeling of admin presence during my play time just led me to find alternatives.
Still love Mander, there’s just lots of appealing options out there to explore.
Salamander is going through an identity crisis… Or rather it’s always in the state of having an identity crisis.
Upstream SS14 is designed with LRP in mind. Salamander uses upstream with a few changes in rules and very small changes in configs (which practically do not impact gameplay at all). Essentially, if you compare Mander to any other LRP Wizden server, they’re not really different - meaning Mander is more of a higher LRP server instead of a MRP server.
It’s not really a bad thing, however: there are multiple MRP servers out there, and Mander serves as a good introduction to MRP environment in general. I believe this might be the main reason for cyclical online changes listed above - Mander isn’t a dedicated MRP environment, it’s more of an introduction to it.
I’d agree, it’s just that since most Wizden LRP players transition directly to Salamander when they want to try MRP out, some of those instincts to solve problems through action rather than interaction shines through and leads to a lot of malding over “why didn’t you just say X or talk to Y before you did Z?”. It’s definitely an introduction server in that sense and you can’t really maintain RP quality in that type of environment. It’s just how Salamander has been and will be, can’t really imagine a way to shift player culture in a way that RP quality stays at a certain level without more active intervention but even then what can you do.
As somebody who used to play Salamander, what ultimately motivated me to switch from it to Harmony & Funky was a combination of the lack of content and seeing the same faces all over again. (Seriously, 58 of my Salamander rounds have had Tar-Awas in them).
Those two factors ultimately mean that Salamander stopped being fun for me. The most enjoyable Salamander round in recent months was the one on Reach because of a DDOS attack.
I personally have never joined a Salamander shift or done really anything in MRP servers because they feel intimidating, especially on WizDen 
I feel like I would get on very well there since I really play this game mostly for a roleplay experience and I just like to do my job, but the whole application process, accepting small batches of players in waves, and just a general more serious experience makes Mander feel a bit intimidating.
So I pretty much just stick to low-pop LRP shifts to avoid too much chaos while also not seeing the same faces every single shift.
dont be too intimidated 
if you feel you’d be a good fit come on over. crew who like to do there job are the types that fit well.
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