Following on from my last graph, I decided to investigate how many "active" players we have in each rating group.
I decided that "active" for globally rated games was 50 games or more:
From this we can see that the growth in active players is mainly driven from people with global MEANS in the 1000 - 1500 range (aka, ~800 to 1300 rating)
The larger numbers of these players masked trends for higher rated groups in this graph, so I decided to plot them separately:
While there were never very many players in the 2000+ mean bracket (1800+ rating) there has been a clear downward trend, with there only being half the number active in that group as this time two years ago.
I also did the same for ladder, with "active" meaning 10 games or more in a month (since fewer ladder games are played:
Here its quite clearly the low rating groups which are the odd ones out, with the number of active people with 1000 mean or less (~800 rating or less) on ladder increasing drastically in recent months.
All other rating groups for ladder seem to be falling significantly though.
Source : https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13449&start=20#p139889