The fact that at this time last year it would not be atypical to find 30-60 players online at this time during non-events. If you really want to do a data analysis you could make a spreadsheet of games tracked through statshark. But anecdotally speaking most people that play at this time will tell you that the number of games as smaller and the games are resolved quicker.
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according to StAtSharT, in the top 30 spawned vehicles, more than half in february are in the top tier bracket range 13.7-14.7
18 out of 30
lets do games instead of spawns just in case
barely any change.
statistics say top tier sb is doing fine in regards to population, more than any other tier.,
FIY this is february one year ago
if anything people played lower tiers more a year ago.
in other words, the macro trend is SB air activity is concentrating more and more in modern jets.
You might want to look at the numbers; especially for planes that are not typically favored by PVE grinders.
Let’s look at the Eurofighters for a second since most Eurofighter nations have not really received anything noteworthy for their top tier lineup since December of last year. We could also use USA but I am not going to do try to normalize player population for addition of new F/A-18 etc.
German Eurofighter had 17,000 games played in Feb. 2025. It was roughly 3 months old at that point.
Compare this with the 7,700 games played in Feb. 2026 with the German Eurofighter AESA.
Or we can use the Brit Eurofighter as a benchmark as well. 6,300 games in Feb. 2025
The new one only had 2,500 games in Feb.2026
We can also see this general decline in the Rafale as well.
Even if you add the numbers for the new Rafale to the numbers for the old one…it is still nowhere near as popular as it was a year ago.
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Your claim was that “top tier is dead because of iron dome”
Not “the SB population is declining”
two wildly different things. One is a distribution problem, the other is a absolute number problem.
furthermore
it’s impossible to associate causality to a “correlation” (being generous here), which is what you claim, because you don’t have data.
Statistically, your claim is refuted by the fact that the most played vehicles are top tier vehicles. They have the lion’s share of games played and times spawned, even if the total player count has diminished (which we don’t have data for)
Then pray tell what do you think has caused the overall decline of the top tier sim population? Why is it that there are only 14 active top tier players across 3 different servers? What is your hypothesis?
7 Likes
You’re moving goalposts but I’ll bite.
I ran the numbers. First of all, there has actually been an increase in game played at top tier.
The decline is almost entirely in lower tiers.
Lower tier activity got cut in half (-43.5%), while top tier actually grew slightly (+9.9%) in absolute games. The playerbase is consolidating upward, people are either playing modern jets or not playing at all.
Within top tier, activity is fragmenting. More vehicles splitting the same pool of players means each individual aircraft looks worse even though the bracket as a whole is fine.
The Eurofighter and Rafale didn’t lose players to Iron Dome frustration, it lost them to the Su-30SM2 and F/A-18E and Gripen and other new vehicles.
What is down is overall SB activity across all tiers (-26%).
But that’s not a top-tier problem, it’s a mode-wide problem, and lower tiers are hemorrhaging far worse than top tier is.
A snapshot of server population at off-peak hours on a weekday tells you almost nothing about the overall health of the bracket. Using your own statshark bible as the data source directly contradicts your claims.
My hypothesis doesn’t matter because your premise is wrong. The data you brought to this argument shows top tier isn’t declining. The whole mode is shrinking, and top tier is the part shrinking the least.
What happens when you break the data down and segregate actual top tier from 14.0 and lower where lack of AESA radars do not make Iron Dome prevalent? This mechanic has around 90% disapproval rate amongst whoever has voted in this poll. Do you think people are not altering what brackets they play in order to avoid this mechanic?
3 Likes
Yes. Only fox3, good point.
you’re moving goalposts again
we try to cherry pick as much as possible to support our claims, I guess?
BUT NONETHELESS I will bite, again, because you’re digging your own grave at this point.
I broke it down exactly the way you asked: BR 14.0–14.7.
feb 2025: 97,188 games
feb 2026:136,340 games
That’s an INCREASE of 39,152 games, or +40.3%.
Its share of the top-60 sample also went from 20.1% to 38.2%. So the exact bracket where you’re claiming players are avoiding the mechanic actually became more active, not less.
If players were truly shifting away from 14.0–14.7 to avoid Iron Dome, the data should show that bracket shrinking. It doesn’t. It shows the opposite.
Does any of this show average player time in matches?
1 Like
sadly no, the only things statshart gives me is
per vehicle
and also
but only for 2025, no way to compare with 2026
You’re right. This is actually a very popular mechanic and top tier sim has never been better!
I, too, like to make strawmen when I’m factually wrong to deflect attention.
I really think thats a huge key factor. Without that I’m not sure this shows anything other then more games made. Im assuming this also includes split lobbies, which have absolutely been more common in the past year.
Though even still this is all inferring.
What I can say without a doubt is the prime complaint every top tier I’ve played, comming from random players not viewers of mine, is they are no longer playing top tier due to this meta or are playing much less of it. It absolutely is having an effect, but it’s impossible to show with numbers since those are purely up to interpretation.
Could be just the loud vocal minority, but it is a noticeable trend just from ingame chats.
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I’m not saying iron dome meta isn’t a factor that can push players away, just pointing out that stating the relationship of causality is a conjecture at best and outright wrong at worst.
Please look at all of the planes that red team has in Feb. 2025 in the 14.0 - 14.7 bracket. There are literally 0 Russian planes in your Feb.2025 sample size which is obviously going to skew results.
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then get better sources for me to nibble on. You’re the one that brought up statshark and asked to segregate 14.0-14.7 instead of what I did which was 13.7-14.7 specifically to account for this
It is not hard to figure out what top tier looked like a year ago based on the old brackets and what planes were in the game. Just by not counting Su-27SM and Su-34 in your figures is leaving out around 46,000 games in your figure. It is only recently that there has been a 13.7 or 13.3 bracket.
This is why I made comparisons amongst Eurofighters since players with those tech trees have had the lowest number of additions that would cause them to migrate to other planes in their own tech tree.
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Well if you want me to crunch numbers before 14.7 was added then you’re gonna need to provide me the numbers.
you literally told me to segregate actual top tier from 14.0 and lower. I did exactly what you asked. 14.0 to 14.7
Your eurofighter example doesn’t do much. even a insanely popular plane like the bf-109 f4 is trending down. you cant extrapolate this into a causal conclusion
the point is, you can’t say “iron dome killed top tier”. There is no data to back up that claim, if anything, the existing data supports the opposite conclusion.
Surely the majority of players think this is a good and healthy mechanic, that makes playing top tier the most fun experience in this game!
1 Like