The end of the month fell very nicely right before the weekend, which made it much easier for me to get the stats out quickly. I can't guarantee this kind of turnaround in future months, but it's nice when it happens.
The most interesting statistic I noticed this month was the total battles hosted on the server. I haven't checked all the past months, but I'm pretty sure April completely shattered the old record. I believe our previous high was roughly 540,000 battles in a single month. This month, we topped that by almost 100,000 battles! That kind of leap is simply staggering. I can't really explain it. Maybe the US release of HGSS has finally kicked into high gear, people have completed their ingame challenges, and now they are looking into competitive play? I don't know.
The server now has almost 500 users during peak usage, and that level sustains for hours and hours. Server lag is a constant problem and it is a huge consideration as I am working on the next version of our battle simulator. Handling the sheer load of users on the battle server is a much bigger issue than most people realize. And collecting stats on that many battle logs has its own challenges. But, the popularity of the server is going through the roof, and that is a good sign for competitive pokemon in general. Even if it gives us system admins fits... ;-)
These stats were gathered from 632,398 individual battles that were fought during the month of April on the Smogon Shoddy Battle Server. Usage and Leads are listed in the posts directly below this one.
Happy stat hunting!
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