I don´'t know....http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1837491 I think this makes more sense.KScorp said:Ok, the top bar is filling. Most likely the more people playing concurrently, the faster the top bar fills. (So if no one is playing, you don't lose any progress of the top bar, it just stops going further.) At least, that's how it should work if they want to model distributed computing somewhat accurately.
So it's not just that you are playing, it's how long you're playing. We don't need everyone playing at once.
(Although I don't know about the red bars in the game, maybe they work the same way. Once a bar is filled, playing that game doesn't help the overall progress, or something like that.)