How we measure players and uptime

Every player count and uptime figure on this site is measured by us. None of it is reported by the server owner, and none of it can be edited from a dashboard. This page explains exactly how, including where the method stops working.

What actually happens

Every five minutes each listing with an address is asked, in its own game's query protocol, whether it is up and how many people are on it. That is the same question your game client asks when it draws a server browser, so nothing has to be installed on the owner's side and nothing can be faked in transit.

The result goes into a log, and the uptime percentages come from that log rather than from a running total that could drift.

What "offline" means, and when we do not say it

A single missed reply is not an outage. UDP packets go missing often enough that flipping a listing to offline on one miss would make the badge worthless, so it takes two consecutive failures.

The reverse matters more. A day we did not check is shown as a gap, not as zero. Our monitoring being down is not the same as a server being empty, and drawing it as empty would be a false statement sitting on somebody else's listing. The same rule applies to a listing with no measurements at all: its uptime is blank, not 0%.

Games we can reach but cannot count

Some games hand out a custom client and answer nothing else - Lineage 2, Metin2, Tibia, Silkroad, Ragnarok and most of the private-server scene. For those we can confirm that the login server is accepting connections, and that is all.

Listings in those games show Online with no number beside it. We could invent a figure. We do not, because a made-up player count is exactly the thing this whole system exists to replace.

What a stale reading looks like

A measurement is only shown while it is recent. Past an hour the badge disappears rather than showing an old number, because a stale count telling you a dead server is busy is worse than showing nothing at all.