All the discussion about established players playing less these days or top players leaving the game for one reason or another (including life getting in the way, burnout, loss of gift cards...) made me wonder "Just how bad is it?".
I took some time today and did some research. I used genorb's list of the top 100 players on Sept. 30, 2011, nearly a year and a half ago and to keep the amount of work to a reasonable level selected the top 25 Legends only.
I then went to the profile of each of the Top 25 players and collected a few stats. The data is posted in the picture below. Click the image for the larger, senior view of the data.
Scores posted includes ranked rounds, blitz scores, CTTHs. Whatever gets recorded in our score history. Just an indication they are active and how active. I did not check if they were playing Alt Shots or Match plays, just too much work.
Would be interesting to hear comments from any of these players as to what's going on.
Here's a summary of the data. Note I excluded LTDmin from this summary as he was already inactive on 9/30/11.
21% are totally inactive at this time (5 of the 24) Only 1 of the 5 stuck around long enough to make Tour Legend.
25% are barely active, semi-retired, playing on average less than once per day, less than 55 scores posted this year. (6 of 24)
29% are active. Playing on average 1 to 3 times per day. But no doubt playing much less than they played per day back in 2011. (7 of 24)
25% are still very active. Playing on average about 4 times per day, logging 200+ rounds this year. (6 of 24)
In other words, about half are no longer regularly playing, another quarter playing at a very reduced rate, and the remaining quarter are still grinding out scores.
9 of the 19 top players who have played this year have higher averages than they did in Sept. 2011.
Of the 13 semi-retired and active players, where their complete 2013 scores are available, 9 are averaging less scores/day in February than in January.