Nine of every ten new players are gone in two weeks.

You have heard it in every country chat. Our nation is old. Nobody new joins. The veterans carry everything and when they quit the lights go out.

I got tired of hearing it as an opinion.

Last time I followed the money and asked who pays for your war. Before that I followed every gold tip in the game, and once I went looking for the man who pressed dislike 283 times. This time I followed the people.

I counted every living player in WarEra, put them in age bands the way a demographer does, and drew the population pyramids. One for the world, one for every country big enough to draw.

The folk belief turns out to be true. It is also, in the way that matters most, far too kind.

what a population even is here

I walked the citizen listings of all 180 countries, then pulled a profile for every account they returned. 18,557 accounts. 234 are serving a standing ban and are out of every number below. That leaves 18,323 living players, and that is the whole game.

Then I found the thing that changed the article.

Not one of those 18,557 accounts had gone more than 3.6 days without logging in. Not one at seven days. Not one at thirty. Every single account carried the server's own active flag.

The country lists do not contain dormant players. The game stops listing you about three days after you stop playing.

So there is no inactive population to go find. When WarEra says your country has citizens, it means people who played this week. Your national population number is not a roster. It is an attendance sheet.

That is why you cannot see the decline you keep arguing about. The dead are not in the list. They were removed.

Part II: the world pyramid, and the ceiling nobody can climb

Level is age. It is the closest thing this game has to a birthday, and unlike gold it cannot be bought, traded or gifted.

Blue is everyone who was already here a month ago: 12,277 of you. Red is everyone who arrived in the last 30 days: 6,046. A third of the living population of WarEra has been here less than a month.

Median level across everybody is 23. Among players past level 10 it is 28.

Now look at where the red stops.

Nobody who joined in the last 30 days is past level 18. Thirty players are tied at exactly that ceiling, among them https://app.warera.io/user/6a52a88314c290c3485c4889, https://app.warera.io/user/6a52289045b1caa192875d79, https://app.warera.io/user/6a52d83f83fa2217f70bd2d9, https://app.warera.io/user/6a51f7ac3e2cc9194d6ca5d8 and a Honduran account called https://app.warera.io/user/6a518488f03322ed53481a39, all of them about 29 days old.

That is the finding the whole article rests on. Level is not skill and it is not money. It is time served. A level 40 cannot be manufactured in a month by anybody, no matter how hard they play or how much they spend.

Which means a country's pyramid is its history, and it cannot be faked.

It also means the top of the pyramid needs a warning label. Level 50 is a ceiling, not a life stage. It collects people forever, exactly like the "85 and over" bracket on a real population pyramid. 379 players sit there. That band is not a cohort and must never be compared with a five-level band below it.

Part III: the cliff

So newcomers arrive in enormous numbers. Do they stay?

I can only answer that for players born between 27 and 31 July. Before that date my index did not exist. After it, the only surviving record of a new account is the walk itself, which by definition contains only survivors, so every later cohort computes to exactly 100 percent retention. That number is circular and I nearly published it.

Five days I can actually measure. 10,790 new accounts:

27 July - 3,814 born, 355 still playing, 9.3 percent. 28 July - 2,163 born, 228 still playing, 10.5 percent. 29 July - 1,470 born, 181 still playing, 12.3 percent. 30 July - 2,356 born, 207 still playing, 8.8 percent. 31 July - 987 born, 113 still playing, 11.4 percent.

1,084 of 10,790. Ten percent. Nine of every ten people who joined WarEra in late July were gone inside a fortnight, and that is an upper bound, because an account created and abandoned between two of my walks was never counted at all.

Here is the part I did not expect, and it is worth more than the headline.

Those five cohorts were not the same age when I counted them. The 31 July group was 9 days old. The 27 July group was 13 days old. If players were still bleeding away across that window, the older cohorts would show lower survival than the younger ones.

They do not. The rates run 11.4, 8.8, 12.3, 10.5 and 9.3 percent, in age order from youngest to oldest. That is noise around ten percent with no trend in it at all.

By day nine the bleeding has already stopped. Whatever kills nine of every ten new players has finished its work before I can see it. The cliff is not at two weeks. Two weeks is just where I happened to be standing when I looked over the edge.

I cannot see the bottom from here. Nobody has measured the first eight days of a WarEra account, including me.

Part IV: the museum

Sort every country by median level and one is not close.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac83c. Median level 42. Of 113 living Chileans, 61 are level 40 or higher and only 9 are below level 10. That is 678 veterans per hundred newcomers, the most top-heavy population in WarEra by nearly a factor of two.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac83c also holds 30 of the game's 379 level-50 players. A country with six-tenths of one percent of the world's population holds nearly eight percent of its maximum-level players.

In the last 30 days, Chile gained 8 people.

Behind it: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac82c at median 34, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac865 33, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac80e 32, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac80b 32, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac858 31, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a0 30, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a4 30.

And the recruiting board, which is the complaint stated as a number. Share of each country's living population that arrived in the last 30 days: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7fe 4.5 percent (8 people), https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac80b 6.3 (7), https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7f2 6.8 (34), https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac83c 7.1 (8), https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7b6 8.1 (17), https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac865 8.1 (25), https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac82c 8.4 (10), https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7aa 9.3 (66).

If you play in one of those eight and you have been saying your country is aging with nobody coming up behind you, you were right.

Then I looked at the other end of the board, expecting to find the healthy countries.

ADVERTISMENT BREAK: https://app.warera.io/mu/6a52426a7bac31d42710e520
paid by: https://app.warera.io/user/687962e6911f445a0eab40a1 to read https://app.warera.io/article/6a2c8f427568f50a4aed1a02

https://app.warera.io/user/695d4d819bd9761af754f28f once again is calling you to join https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8c1 while https://app.warera.io/user/6956738951fac17d4c4d0066 is confused..

Part V: the waiting room

I did not find them.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac84b. 87.4 percent of its living population arrived in the last 30 days. 529 of 605. Behind it, Iraq at 75.5 percent, Indonesia 73.5, Sudan 72.6, Syria 68.7, Pakistan 62.9, Poland 61.0, Egypt 42.7.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac84b looks like the healthiest country in the game. Nine of every ten Algerians playing today were not playing a month ago.

Read that sentence again and it stops sounding healthy.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac84b's median player is level 2. It has exactly one player above level 40, against https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac83c's 61. Its entire veteran core is 76 people, and 423 of its citizens are sitting at levels 1 to 4 right now.

Apply the ten percent. Of those 529 arrivals, on this evidence roughly 53 will still be here in a fortnight.

Algeria is not a nursery. It is a turnstile.

That is the whole article in one picture. https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac83c is 113 veterans with nobody arriving. https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac84b is 605 arrivals with nobody left from before. Neither one is a population. One is a museum and the other is a waiting room, and both of them are running out of people by different routes.

The graveyard board makes it plain. Of every account ever seen under a flag, the share still playing: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac82c 7.3 percent, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac83c 7.5, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac858 8.4, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7eb 8.8, https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac848 9.0. Best retention in the game is https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac84b at 33.5 percent, then https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7a0 25.1 and https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac8da 24.6. In fairness to everyone else: https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac84b's intake is recent, and an account that arrived last week has not had time to quit yet. Some of that 33.5 percent is youth, not loyalty. Ask me again in a month.

Part VI: the healthy shape, and where the Balkans sit

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac79c is the largest country in the game at 1,266 living players, and it is the shape you want: a broad veteran mass through levels 20 to 39, 20 players past level 40, and 164 arrivals feeding in at the bottom. 22.9 percent of every https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac79caccount ever seen is still playing, the sixth-best retention in the game.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac845 is the same size story with the opposite engine. 844 living, second only to https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac79c, but 360 of them arrived this month and only 10.2 percent of every Egyptian account ever indexed is still here. Egypt runs a giant population by replacing it constantly.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7aa is the veteran state: 706 living, 65 past level 40, 22 at the cap, and a wall of 444 players stacked between levels 20 and 29. It is also recruiting at 9.3 percent, eighth-lowest in the game. https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7aa is https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d546e731854c7ac83c with ten years of runway instead of one.

Since most of you reading this are from one of these three:

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7ba - 515 living, 446 past level 10, median level 26 among them, 130 arrivals, 25.2 percent new. A real veteran core, 33 players past level 40, and a quarter of the country new this month. This is the healthy middle.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac7bc - 287 living, 256 past level 10, median 24.5, 91 arrivals, 31.7 percent new. Younger and recruiting harder than Serbia, but only 3 players past level 40. Croatia has a future and very little past.

https://app.warera.io/country/6813b6d446e731854c7ac80e - 145 living, 127 past level 10, median 32, 22 arrivals, 15.2 percent new. Fourth-oldest population in the game and recruiting at half Croatia's rate. Bosnia is where this region will feel it first.

What this actually means

The game does not have a recruitment problem. Ten thousand people joined in five days in July.

It has a retention problem, and a brutally specific one: the cliff is somewhere in the first nine days, before level 10, before anybody in your country has learned the new player's name.

Look at the world pyramid one more time. 3,515 players sitting at levels 1 to 4, and only 714 at levels 5 to 9. The population falls by 80 percent across a gap that takes a couple of days to cross.

That gap is not a level range. It is the exit.

Every country with a veteran core and no arrivals is sitting on the only asset that matters, which is people who already know how to play. And the 30-day ceiling means you can identify every single newcomer in your country by level alone, with no tooling at all. Anyone under level 19 is new. Two weeks of somebody's attention is the entire intervention.

Chile, you have 30 level-50 players and 9 players under level 10. Do that arithmetic before your museum closes.

Sources and limitations. Population is one walk of user.getUsersByCountry across 180 countries pinned 9 August 2026 14:42 UTC, plus user.getUserLite for all 18,557 accounts it returned. Ban status is infos.isBanned, which only getUserLite carries; getUserById omits it and reads as not-banned for everyone. Levels come from this walk alone: the older profile file on my disk is frozen at first fetch, with 8,254 accounts reading below their true level and none above, so any pyramid built on it would be too young. Countries are ranked only with at least 100 players past level 10, which is 34 of 180; every figure quoted here is from a ranked country. "Arrivals" means 30 days measured back from the pin, and 2 accounts carry an unusable birth date and are counted as established rather than new. Retention covers 27 to 31 July only, for the reasons in Part III, and is an upper bound. Graveyard shares use the flag an account carried when it was indexed, not necessarily the one it wore when it quit, and they under-count banned accounts because the citizen walk drops them. Every number in every image above is checked against the same artifact by a script that fails loudly if the prose and the data disagree. The oldest account still playing, for the record, is Femesk of Argentina, level 49, joined 25 June 2023.

I am not a demographer. I just counted everybody, twice, and threw away the answer that flattered us.

Next time I will be a coroner.

https://app.warera.io/user/697b55e4bcecf3b37667e0d1