It's really hard to find new runners/games with the current sorting scheme. I am thrilled with all of the high playercounts, but I am also looking at the bottom of the list too.
Currently if you want to sort by all of the 0 runner games, you don't really get an accurate picture of the situation. It would be really helpful to know if someone has run something within a year or two. So having the ability to change this filter setting ourselves would be much appreciated.
I think that the "active runners" calculation doesn't work well towards the end of the list. These games might have active runners, but just because they don't have multiple runs submitted every single week means they have ZERO visibility. Heck I know some streamers don't even bother to submit their runs to leaderboards, or regular people that only submit new pb runs if they are satisfied with it.
So if someone wants to show that their community is active, basically all of the runners for that community should just submit a bunch of runs that are slower than their pb (which preserves the leaderboard) and a mod for that game can just approve them all.
TLDR: The Active Player System is gameable and inaccurate at the bottom of the list where lower activity levels are heavily weighed in discoverability. This greatly lowers the utility of the site. Having the default sort by active runners just seems a bit flawed without properly configuring it for the little guys too.
I agree, I love seeing smaller games grow a community. I'm currently trying to learn some games that only have 5-6 runners, like Alfred Chicken for the NES.
On the topic of people not submitting runs to the leaderboards, I don't think we can really expect the site to take those into account. Sure, it'd be ideal to take into account every single person running the game outside of speedrun.com, but I don't think it's a realistic goal.
That being said, I believe that adding some sort of setting when searching for games to let the user decide what accounts for "Active Players" for them would help with this issue, since some users may consider "Active Players" as players with runs in the last 30 days while some would also include players with runs in the last year. I still believe this would be far from a perfect solution, but it might alleviate the problem somewhat.
Don't forget that the current "active runners" count in the games page completely ignore IL runs, so there might be much more active games than it seems, only it won't be visible on the list.
Wait, IL runs don't count towards "active runners"? That seems like a bit of an oversight.
Are we really saying IL runners aren't true runners for the game?
I understand that noone's actually saying that, but given the current behavior of the active runner counter, it would seem to be indirectly implying that. If this is not what it's intended to represent, then perhaps a modification would be in order.
Well, the active runners "count" in the statistics page of each game does take into account IL runs, but that counter has a whole different kind kinds of issues. Edit: also, this was reported several times in the feedback thread by the way.