If you're interested in knowing what kind of player activity TradeWars is seeing today, I just added a tracker to the Jumpgate page. It shows the total number of active servers (defined as servers that were online on the previous full day), as well as the total number of unique players so far this month, so far this year, and last year.

These statistics, of course, are only for TWGS v2.

http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate

And these are only for the public servers who use jumpgate, right?

I have a question about how unique players are counted, since many of us play more than one game at a time.

Some will visit a game, look around and NOT play, but the player deletion is set for 365 days, or some high number. Then this player does the same thing on a few more games before finally settling on playing one. Now they have half a dozen "active" player accounts in different games on different servers. Are each of these counted as one?

The stats here are total number of active servers per day, not just Jumpgate servers. There have been over 1000 TWGS v2 servers registered since it was released (about 120 servers/month), but about 100 of them are consistently active.

For players, this tracks unique player IPs, so it's more like website activity tracking. And it's across all servers. If you visit 5 different servers, you're still treated as one unique player, as long as you're coming in from the same IP. So right now, we seem to be getting about 1000 unique players visiting the active sites each month. I know not all of those players may actually end up playing a game, but I think it's significant to track the number of visits to servers, because that's an indication of the potential pool of players, whether or not we've gotten the game to a point where those players will "stick".

Not all servers are counted here. Some are run without Internet access and can't signal server or player activity. And of course no v1 activity. But I think it's a pretty good indicator.