Last September, while writing my "How many people use C:SI?" post, I privately wondered how long it would be before I could announce that there were now over a million recorded* duels fought using the Combat: Samurai Island combat system…
I’ve been basically ignoring the official C:SI forums lately, and I’ve felt bad about it, but between working two RL jobs and some personal issues it just hasn’t been something that came up in my thoughts a lot. Today I decided to take care of that, in true geek style. I dug through the administration interface of the new CMS and figured out how to create and publish an RSS feed for the forums, and then subscribed to that so that I’d be able to know whenever someone made a new post on the C:SI forums. Yeah, pretty nerdy of me to do that, but now I’m automatically notified rather than having to remember.
Not satisfied with that, I decided to also put the 10 most recently created C:SI Forum topics on the sidebar of my blog, so that they’d get a little more exposure. And that’s when I looked up and saw it…
Some time in the recent past, C:SI has recorded OVER 1 MILLION DUELS! Woot! Not only that, but check out the difference in the number of users since September 9, 2007:
Since then there have been nearly 3,000 new members, and over a thousand new sims where duels have been fought.
That’s some pretty decent growth, if you ask me 
* Not all duels in the history of C:SI are recorded here. This is only the count of duels fought since the grid-wide scoring system was implemented.
[UPDATE] Esprite has made an official announcement on this, and has included more information (see the announcement for the rest of what he had to say) :
Though we’ve been developing C:SI for much longer, we first began keeping track of scores on our beta scorekeeper October of last year and just recently we surpassed over 1,000,000 duels gridwide! Overall pretty sweet, and almost half of those came from the last 4-5 months.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Holy carp! O.O I was floored back in November when you said there had been a *half million* spars! But a million! *yeek* =^.^=
Hehe… Was that really such a short time ago that I said that? Wow!
It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it? Combat: Samurai Island has the most impressive growth rate of anything I’ve participated in, development-wise, as well as the biggest and most-active community.
Even though it’s apples-to-oranges, I often wonder how C:SI stacks up to other combat systems in Second Life in terms of number of active participants. To my knowledge, none of the other systems compile (or publish) usage statistics and growth rates [NOTE TO SELF: I gotta start making some charts to visualize this stuff].