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I’m pretty new to FR. I’ve only been playing consistently for a few months (my account is older, but I rarely logged in). In order to get an idea of how the community works, I’ve been reading a lot of forums lately – including those that track things like flight population. It’s really interesting stuff!

But personally, I’m more interested in the dragons themselves than how popular a flight is. I haven’t found anyone else tracking this, so it inspired me to start my own project. Rather than users, however, I’m tracking the number of active dragons per breed. Obviously, the amount of active dragons in any given breed can be affected by a number of different variables – breed rarity, popularity, breed changes, How Many Ugly Dragons Were Born And Subsequently Exalted, et cetera. Simply put, there’s no way to truly explain why a breed has x number of active dragons. But looking at these variables, I have my own hypotheses about how many of each breed exists.

So my plan is to take inventory every Saturday evening (EST), right before the start of the new FR week, and post the results on Sunday mornings. Since dragon population fluctuates by the second, these numbers are always going to be approximate. But I still think it’s worth looking at. I’ll be recording the number of active dragons per breed and taking note of which breeds have the most and least active dragons. Adding all of them up gives me an idea of how many active dragons exist at any given time, so I’ll throw that in too.

I took inventory for the first time last night (April 6th, 2019), and I’ll post the results below. But this morning I realized something else: if I track the number of exalted dragons compared to active dragons, that might give me a better idea of true popularity. I didn’t record that last night, though, so I’ll start next week.

In the future, I’ll be adding charts that show fluctuation over time, but since I only have one set of data right now, it’d be pretty pointless for today. Something to look forward to, I guess?

I don’t actually expect anyone to be interested in or follow this long-term (I’m doing this purely to sate my own curiosity), but if you want to be added to a pinglist just let me know!

- Gray


EDIT: Here's a handy chart, courtesy of @MiniDrachin - thank you so much! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B3kM1-T9NWFf7hQnx6ES5pGbeVsIrtscqfFhRnlK3k0/edit#gid=1553043590

[i]Stats from April 6th, 2019[/i] [img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/564487238897893401/564487619644227606/unknown.png[/img] [b]Total active dragons:[/b] 10,520,403 [b]Most frequent breed:[/b] Imperial [b]Least frequent breed:[/b] Snapper The biggest surprise, for me, was how few Snappers there are. I know they’re not a popular breed, but I figured that Tundras would be the least frequent breed because of how rarely I hear people talking about loving Tundras. In reality, I wasn’t even close – Bogsneaks, Wildclaws, Ridgebacks, and Snappers all appear less frequently than Tundras. My guess is that this is because Tundras are plentiful breed. Ridegbacks’ and Snappers’ lack of popularity accounts for their low frequency of appearance, and Bogsneaks are a significantly newer (in comparison) breed, but the Wildclaws really surprised me. The other Rare breed (Coatl) has almost double the number of active dragons. As for most frequent breed, I assumed it’d be Skydancers, but they’re only 3rd place (Guardians come in at #2). This experiment definitely made me reevaluate the assumptions I had about breed frequency, and I’m curious to see how/if this changes in the future!

[i]Stats from April 13th, 2019[/i] [img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/564487238897893401/567178989387513870/unknown.png[/img] [b]Total active dragons:[/b] 10,571,250 [b]Total exalted dragons:[/b] 39,258,454 As promised, I’m now counting exalted dragons as well. It’s made for some interesting observations… • Imperials and Snappers are once again the most and least populous breeds, respectively. I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon, but I guess we’ll find out. • Roughly 5 out of every 6 Snappers is exalted. They have the highest exaltation rate out of all the breeds, at a whopping 83.4% of all total Snappers being exalted. • Comparatively, the closest second is Guardians something like 82.2%. However… • There’s just, so many Guardians you guys. So many. Far and away the most populous breed, if you count exalted dragons – they beat second place (Imperials) by more than a million dragons. • Overall (including exalted dragons), Bogsneaks have the smallest numbers – unsurprising, considering how new they are. The breed with the most dragons (Guardians), outnumbers them by 5 million. • On a similar note, Guardians, Imperials, and Skydancers all have more currently active dragons than the total historical Bogsneak population. By several hundred thousand. • Nearly 50 million dragons (in total) have existed on Flight Rising • The number of active dragons increased by about 50,000 this week! I don’t have much to say, as the numbers speak for themselves, but dang. Poor Snappers.

Thank you for doing this! Really cool project, I'll be bookmarking [emoji=tundra happy]

@Zenzic That's a great point, I totally forgot!

@Deladria I use the FR search; but since you have to use 2 search categories, I separate by male and female, then search both at the same time and combine them for an overall number