I've been thinking about something and the number one thing that gets me to want to play a game is of course people. Once a game essentially dies and rarely has anyone playing, I just don't want to ever go near it. Now, Steam has a nice little statistical page that basically allows you to see how active their games are and which games have the most overall activity and peak activity.
Here is the link: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Now each time I think about a game I really want to play, I really question the overall activity level that the game has from a public perspective. I think that a hidden factor like private games (pugs, scrims, league, etc) are just too difficult to calculate and I don't know if it's worth my time getting mumble, ventrillo, mirc set up, etc.

Now, I'm wondering if someone could maybe write a simple algorithm for a couple games, based on say, how many servers have 2 or more players and maybe even the duration of the games played. I mean I have no clue how difficult this would be to implement but ideally the calculations would simply yield some number that we can use to compare to other games. And the website could officially just be that, three numbers that refresh every couple of minutes.

Q4I: 10
Q3I: 1000
QLI: 4000
QWI: 2000

Something like this, comparing how active Quake 3 is to Quake live.

Now the thing is, I'm wondering if there is any program that can even check offline how many servers Quake Live has.

I would really like to be able to see how many people are playing through a gametracker type thing or a third party-hack /software.

Anyway, this is all rather silly rubbish, but I think it would be interesting to see if these indexes are made how they rise and fall and where the general level of activity is. Who knows maybe they'll be some surprises and maybe additional games can be added like Warsow and we'll discover something interesting.