There's a lot of players from Chile, Brazil, Argentina and mainly South America. They're actually keeping this league alive I'd say. The other large group of players descend from eastern europe, especially Russia. Why is this? If we look to the States, you can really name all players in one hand, and they all started playing either in the late 90's or early 00's. USA is not contributing with any new faces to this game, atleast not anyone that sticks around. Same goes with the UK.

How come new players descend from certain parts of the world? Why is Worms particulary so popular in Chile?

Quote from: Crazy on March 01, 2013, 11:13 AMespecially Russia.

in Russia, only Steam users would pay for W:A (not counting 0.0001% of "heroes" which would actually go for an overseas CD). there are lots of torrents, their quantity competes with Brazil (2nd most popular nation on WormNET), they're so many that you see the result.

but I'd tell you, most of Russians never played W:A before because a publisher, Russobit-M released both W:A and WWP at the same time in 2002! which is why they are all for WWP at start, and there are still lots of them. this is the impact of how international things came to us in the past: a perfect example is a NES console clone "Dendy", which was the only one and the most popular one available in the previous century here due to specific treatment to electronics, and 90% of people today still think Dendy was an actual console (without copying anything) and don't know about real NES at all

which is why having W:A on Steam is actually important

Current text statistic is here: http://stats.worms2d.info/countries.txt
Russia was around 40% before small percents of people from multiple different small countries started to come up. the stats are more "scattered" now

As StepS mentioned, the piracy rate in Brazil or Russia is much higher. W:A being *free* in certain countries have kept the game more active.

Also, if You are (as example) from Norway, You wont find many norwegians players in #ag online, maybe only Masta and Crazy. If You are chilean or brazilian, all the time the wormnet has many wormers connected, so the fact about to find buddies online from the same country helps to increase the popularity in these nations.

Here's the number of users on TUS from a given country divided by a total population. Lower = more wormers per capita. Statistics made for countries with more than 20 users. Turns out the most wormy nations in the world are... Finland and Croatia
Interestingly, Russia and Brazil are trailing behind, with only one per 500-550 thousand citizens of these countries being registered on TUS.

Finland 124k
Croatia 126k
Chile 130k
Hungary 171k
Poland 175k
Costa Rica 178k
Norway 231k
Serbia 262k
Bulgaria 299k
Portugal 397k
UK 409k
Argentina 410k
Sweden 442k
Brazil 502k
Italy 513k
Netherlands 531k
Germany 543k
Russia 550k
Australia 614k
Ukraine 668k
Canada 770k
Romania 815k
France 841k
Spain 906k
US 1460k
Colombia 1540k
Turkey 2160k
Mexico 2450k

Quote from: barman on March 01, 2013, 11:39 AMInterestingly, Russia and Brazil are trailing behind, with only one per 500-550 thousand citizens of these countries being registered on TUS.

in fact it's pretty clear why so few are registered on TUS. TUS is not a prerequisite to enter WormNET, nor is it promoted on the official server, or sort of things. 90% of Russians are noobs from torrents with most of them either never learning, stagnating in the same skill level, or stopping to play quickly, but only those to stay long enough and with the desire to play competitively go for TUS.

Okay, that explains a lot. But for example, a country like Italy has brought in a wave of new players to this league in Ano, Angus, Casso, sbaffo, borotalco, Orange, easy and so on. There must be a specific reason for why they've discovered this game and this league, in comparision with for example their neighbours from France?

http://stats.worms2d.info/countries.html

There has been a huge upsurge of polish players in the past few months, mainly due to the polish news aggregator, similar to Digg  - 'Wykop'.
A post titled (something along the lines) '3.7.0.0 for worms armageddon released,  team17 company proven to still care about older games' managed to hit frontpage, resulting in the sudden boom in polish community. I think that many people are just misinformed about how hugely improved this game has become over the years, and perhaps they don't think it would even run on newer systems.



I think people in those specific countries don't even own a legitimate copy of worms, and since online play is accessible with pirated copies it made it so popular. And I guess they can really spread anything.

Interesting numbers Barman.. Norway is not doing that bad after all Maybe TUS could be promoted on the official server? Would it hurt that much?

another impact of the torrents is the quality of the humans. I often see harsh and insults in Russian (and other languages of course) on the channels, this all comes from their education and explains why they torrented the game.
however when W:A released on Steam, a quick upsurge of polite players has begun. I noticed that most if not all of Steam users respect others, ask for help gently and other sort of things.
not too hard to conclude all this stuff

Would certainly help if T17 finally released WA on steam as a stand-alone game. Are they just lazy or well, ignorant?

HHC i hope it will happen when 3.7.2.0 comes out (in a few weeks), because there are plans to do a synchronized release which would mean heavily prodding Team17 as well

I doubt torrent usage is connected with education.

Quote from: StepS on March 01, 2013, 11:57 AM
when 3.7.2.0 comes out (in a few weeks)

uhm next update, coooool !!!!!



TOP20 countries in WN

19.02% [RU] Russian Federation
11.43%
 Brazil
10.69% [PL] Poland
7.61% [US] United States
5.43% [ES] Spain
4.89% [AR] Argentina
3.44% [GB] United Kingdom
3.14% [FR] France
3.03% [CL] Chile
2.85% [DE] Germany
2.75% [IT] Italy
2.24% [HU] Hungary
1.66% [MX] Mexico
1.51% [CZ] Czech Republic
1.48% [UA] Ukraine
1.29%

---

Croatia
1.28% [FI] Finland
1.24% [CA] Canada
1.04%

Turkey 0.92% [CR] Costa Rica

Quote from: Prankster on March 01, 2013, 11:59 AM
I doubt torrent usage is connected with education.

are you sure? what about 11 year old kids? well I of course didn't say that "all" of them are badly educated, yet you often get to see flaming on #AG.