Yesterday saw Crowfall put out a tiny patch that didn’t really do much on its face beyond changing a resource respawn and preventing some graphics adjustment settings from being changed in certain situations. That alone wouldn’t really be newsworthy except for the feature that the patch notes don’t detail: a stealthy change to the game’s API that has prevented bots from pulling player counts.
This API change specifically affects a Discord bot known as Malekai, which provided population numbers for each of the campaign servers as well as a full number of players in the game. As of yesterday’s patch, the API now displays the population capacity, which is only a small percentage indicator.
As one would expect, this has kicked off a lot of renewed discussion about whether MMOs should share their player numbers versus how important player counts can be in an RvR style MMO. One way or the other, this new development now further obfuscates how populated Crowfall is after its launch – a concern that some players (but not all) carry.
