How to read the Tracker metrics

The Tracker counts public game servers across the internet and tells you which network each one sits on. It is not a customer list or a sales figure: it is what servers advertise about themselves in each game's public listing. This guide explains what every number means, which ones mislead if you read them wrong, and what questions you can actually answer with them.

You will find it under Tools → Tracker.

1. The five figures at the top

The overview opens with five cards. They summarise the collector's most recent run:

Servers listed — unique servers seen, counted by IP address and port. A server that hides from the public list is not here.
Players reported — the sum of what each server says it has. Nobody verifies it: a server can inflate its own figure, and some do.
Flagged share — how much of the above comes from bot farms. Read section 2 before you use any other number.
Networks seen — how many autonomous systems (AS) host at least one server.
Games tracked — how many games the collector watches, and how many of them have players right now.

2. "Flagged": the number that changes all the others

Some operations publish thousands of fake servers from a single machine to promote a brand or pad a ranking. Left in, they dominate any total.

The rule is public and mechanical. We look at every (game, IP address) pair on its own and flag it when it:

advertises 40 or more entries with duplicated names, or
advertises 200 or more empty entries (zero players) of that game.

When an IP is flagged for a game, every entry it advertises for that game is flagged, not just the duplicates.

Flagged entries are counted, never removed. The Hide flagged switch takes them out of view whenever you want, but the data stays. We do not quietly delete anything and then present the remainder as the truth.

Why this matters so much: on the older Valve games the flagged share routinely exceeds 90%. A Counter-Strike 1.6 "server count" is overwhelmingly smoke. Turn Hide flagged on before comparing games against each other.

3. "Short" and "Carried over" are two different warnings

These are the two flags you will see in the tables and in the status header, and they do not mean the same thing:

Short — the sweep did run and the numbers are real observations, but they are missing an amount we cannot know. It happens when a game's listing hits the cap its API imposes, or when part of the sweep never answered.
Carried over — nothing was observed: the source failed and the previous run's numbers were copied forward.

When a run comes back short, the change column is deliberately left blank. A difference measured against a short count describes the collector, not the internet, and we would rather show you nothing than a 40% crash that never happened.

4. The history chart

Every network row and game row has a Plot button. Press it and that line joins the chart above, and the button changes to On chart. That is how you put several networks or games on the same axis.

The chart carries at most eight lines, because the palette has eight colours that stay apart from one another. Plotting a ninth drops the smallest line currently drawn.
Click a legend entry to hide its line without removing it. Colours stay with the network, so hiding one never recolours the rest.
If you only see two points, the range you picked only contains two runs. Widen it.

5. Networks (AS): what they do and do not tell you

Every server is attributed to the autonomous system that announces its IP address. This is genuinely useful and very easy to misread:

An AS is not a company. It is the network announcing the address. A reseller renting a rack inside a large provider's range is invisible — its servers are counted under the provider.

Read "AS16276" as "addresses OVH announces", never as "servers OVH sold". The gap between those two sentences is the entire reselling business.

Click any network to open its page: which games it hosts, in which countries, and its history.

6. Ranges: measure your own space

The Ranges page is probably the one you will get most out of. You paste lines and it tells you how many game servers sit inside each:

a CIDR prefix — 203.0.113.0/24
a single address — 198.51.100.42
an AS number — AS212238

You can put a label after each line (203.0.113.0/24 Madrid rack) and it shows up in the results. Use it to see what is in your own space, to check whether a range you are being offered is already full of servers, or to follow one block over time.

7. Geo and Compare

Geo breaks the servers down by country and city. Be careful: without a geolocation database we fall back to the country the network is registered in, which is not where the machine is. Treat it as indicative.
Compare puts several games or networks side by side on the same scale.

8. Three questions you can answer today

Is this game growing? Open its page, set the range to 30 days and turn Hide flagged on. If the header warns of an incomplete run, wait for a clean one before concluding anything.
Who hosts my game's servers? Filter the networks table by that game and look at the top rows. Remember section 5: these are networks, not companies.
How many servers are in my range? Paste your prefix into Ranges.

9. What these numbers are not

Not market share. We count advertised servers, not contracts.
Not real players. They are players reported by each server.
Not a full census of the biggest games. When a game's listing hits its API cap, its figure is a floor, not a total.
Not usable for comparing a short run against a clean one.

The Tracker's own Methodology page spells out every limit and why it exists. If a number does not look right, start there.

Need help reading something specific? Open a ticket.