Finding player peak periods

[erwin]

This is what I'm thinking of at the moment, to find player peak periods. However, I'm not sure whether this would be the most efficient way - so I'll post what I'd do - and see if anyone wants to tweak it.

1. Get the syslog of players
2. Look through all the new player created / player generated / player went netdead / player quit / player extracted when idle, etc etc, and simply give a label of "enter" for text signifying a player enters, and "quit" where it means a player quits.
3. Run through each player in the syslog, and map the hours when they are on the MUD - deleting each entry as you find them. When the "syslog" is empty, all players have been accounted for.

Potential questions: Does 2) account for alts? i.e. would we be double counting players?

[Kvetch]

In response to the question, I have two versions of an answer:

1) Since there should only be one player or one alt on at a time, it should only count as one person anyway - since you'd have to log out your "main" to play your "alt"
2) Seeing as there is no way for the system to know that alt and main are same player, there could be double counting.
3) Unless we went by host number where you count the host # each character is from and assume that any that log in during the same hour from the same host is the same player.
4) There are some hosts that host multiple players (think mudconnect.com) so #3 could result in fewer counts and still not be accurate.

So, in my answer I have managed to not answer your question.