I've just posted the latest in a series of regular updates about " Who Played What" – looking at the UK Ancients competition circuit and how it panned out in the rather weird half-year up to the end of 2021
Competition gaming in the UK to all intents and purposes was rendered illegal in early 2020, and did not return until July/August 2021, however all of the leading Ancients competition circuits have surged back to life over the second half of 2021, with events taking place across the length and breadth of the country and feeding into various ranking systems.
This has in turn allowed me to produce a rather truncated (and inevitably as a result even more meaningless than usual!) part-year snapshot of where things stand as of today across the UK in terms of player numbers and engagement at UK competitions held in 2021.
The biggest take-away is the headline stat that the total number of players coming back to competitions is already back up at around 75% of its pre-pandemic level, even on the back of a severely truncated part-year competition programme which saw less than half of the regular UK calendar taking place.
So, things are looking pretty healthy, and as of today there's no real indication that there will be any material long term impact on Ancients competition attendance once things (hopefully..) start to return to normal.
The mix of "who plays what" also hasn't really changed materially from how it was at the end of 2019 either, and once a number of accidents of scheduling work their way out of the calendar in the first half of 2022 there seems every chance that things may well end up almost exactly the same as they were at the end of 2019.
Which would frankly be a really great result all round, all things considered!
The full post is on my blog site as we speak at : link
