Yup it helps them to some degree.
Yesterday there was 55005 players. Today there is 54835. So they are deleting some. Doesn't look like there have been any sign ups though.
One thing I just checked out, took me a while because of dam freezes but there are 7,321 accounts sitting at the end of the tutorial, somewhere during it or have not even loaded the city. That's a massive 13.350718506090889%. Now there will be a load more players who play for 5-10 mins then leave so here we go....
The next thing after the tutorial (19 points) you will be building a house and T1 production. So I have built 1 extra house, leveled it to 2. Upgraded my workshop to level 2 and built a marble factory (21 points). In total 52 points. What I will do is add 17 on because steel production building at level 1 is the highest at 38 points. So new total 69 points. Just doing these few things have only taken 2 minutes.
At this stage: 1 Steel lvl1, 1 WS lvl 2 and 2 Houses lvl 2 - There are 19,096 at this stage or earlier. Maybe 2 or 3 active from registering 2 minutes ago but doubt it.
NEXT: Build 2nd T1 production and level them to lvl 2, Build 2 more houses and level them to lvl 2. (129 points total). 23,857 At this stage or earlier. < This is almost 1/2 the server!!!!
Lets see how close we can get shall we....
Right less than 15 minutes in here is what it looks like.
6 x level 2 houses, 2 x level 2 marble and 5 x level 2 workshops. Remember we are working it on steel. Difference between lvl 2 marble and steel is 42 points combined.
So we add 42 to the total points = 189+42 = 231 points. (Just a little higher than half the amount of players)
15 minutes of gameplay. You can see how little I have done. There are 27,562 at this stage or before. I bet not even 5 of them are still here now unless they registered while I was doing this. This is a total of
50.26260121088336% of the server.
1hr45mins to upgrade 2 houses to lvl 3 adds 8 points. 239 points total. (this is the boring stage having to wait more than 2minutes) There are another 163 within that 8 point difference. So I would like to seriously know how many points on average a player has just before entering chapter 3.
Absolutely insane figures. Hardly any signup. It's a huge joke. I seriously think you can add another 20% on top of that with less than 10 people below chapter 3 actually active.
Read this and weep.
@Muf-Muf