The peak hour heatmap

The peak hour heatmap shows when your players are most active, broken down by day of week and hour of day. It's the fastest way to answer: when should we run an event? When is the safest time for maintenance? What timezone is our community actually in?

How it's built

The heatmap is built from 30 days of player count data. For each combination of day of week and hour of day, the average player count across all occurrences of that slot in the last 30 days is calculated. The result is a 7 by 24 grid showing your server's typical activity pattern.

Using an average across 30 days smooths out one-off events and unusual weeks. A major event that spiked player count on a particular Tuesday won't permanently distort that cell, it just contributes one of the four or five Tuesday readings in the window.

Reading the colours

Darker cells have higher average player counts. The lightest cells have near-zero average players, typically very early morning in the dominant timezone. The darkest cells are your peak hours.

The colour scale is normalised to your server's own data, not an absolute player count. A server with a peak of 5 players will have cells as dark as a server with a peak of 500, because the colour represents your relative activity pattern, not a comparison to other servers.

Practical uses

• Scheduling events: identify your peak windows and schedule events there, maximising attendance without extra promotion
• Maintenance windows: identify the consistently darkest cells and schedule restarts there, minimising disruption to active players
• Understanding your audience: if weekday evenings are your peak, your community is likely school-age or working adults in a similar timezone

The timezone caveat

Heatmap hours are in UTC. If your community is primarily in a specific timezone, shift the heatmap mentally by the UTC offset. A peak at 20:00 UTC is 15:00 US Central (UTC-5) or 21:00 UK time (UTC+1). Knowing your community's predominant timezone makes the heatmap much more actionable.