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Which is the longest story on CYS by word count? 

Probably Eternal

Dead Man Walking by BerkaZerka by a significant amount.  If you go to Search under Storygames, you can sort by Longest and then hover over Length on each story Launch page to see the specific word count.

Yeah, this one. Eternal may be in second but Dead Man Walking is like a million words.

I tried reading dead man manyyyyy years ago, but I actually stopped because I felt too overwhelmed by the insane number of options available to me. I noticed that I kept backclicking to see where another route would take me, only to discover that it now has a million more options that didn't really seem to crossover very much lol

I dont know why that put me off, it just did. Too many options, scared my pea brain away.

Wow, yeah, I didn't know that. Thank you. Hopefully, I'll get a storygame in the top 10 by length one day - that would be pretty cool.

You just need to hit 109k words and you will bump Breaker out of the #10 spot.

DMW is 1.1M words, which if it was all one path it'd be in the top 10 longest novels ever written in english. Eternal and Rogues with 600k and 500k respectively would make top 25 if all their words were poured into one path.

Of course, that only counts traditional novels as a reference to compare to. As far as large word-count works go, obviously there's a lot of video games and franchises with stories that certainly top 1M words - but the largest works to my knowledge are almost exclusively fanfiction. As far as online fanfiction there's the Loud House Revamped which is a fanfic of some childrens cartoon and it's over 16M words, written by many people obviously. The Super Smash Bros fanfic was written by one guy and it's around 4M words. There's also a LOTR fanfic written by a duo that's around 6M words.

In real life the christ fandom has been around so long and so much fanfiction has been written for it that they lost track of the original work and people just started making up their own originals to control others with. It's hard to tell how many words this could be.

Wtf, thats a crazy achievement for berka then. 

That's amazing, I wonder how long it took Berka and End to write such long stories? I've just checked and my longest story is just 50k words, in fact DMW is probably longer than my 30 stories put together! Clearly I need to up my game :D It's also really nice that all these writers put so much time and effort into what is essentially a free gift for everyone when they could monetize their stories and probably get a decent amount for them by limiting access to paying customers.

Eternal was 3 years. I think Rogues was about the same. Granted I probably could have written both of those in much less time, but real life and all. Slowing down, getting older, getting distracted, etc (The Struggle)

But really I've never been too overly impressed by word count for a story, I've always believed a story is as long as it needs to be, whether that's 600K or 9K. Granted the longer stories do have an advantage since there's more potential for a more complex plot, more choices, etc. but there's also the chance of them just being boring slogs.

Northwind's story for the Grimdark fantasy contest comes to mind which was 100K and just sort of went on and didn't grab me, while Malk's ended up winning since he hit all the important points in just 27K.

Lol:D I think people sometimes dive into something incredibly specific that happens to interest them (like Western History...) and forget to make it interesting to the general reader. Maybe the writer is writing this more to indulge his hobby than for others to read?

How did things change for you as youve gotten older would you say? I'm in my early 20s right now I'm and  just curious in what to expect as I get older lol. What do you mean by "slowing down". My dad's 63 and recently started TRT (LIKE 6 months ago now) the difference is pretty dramatic. Oddly enough he's even gained a lot of flexibility back and many of his joint issues have resolved. He's also a lot more muscular again, just stronger. My dad's worked out most. Of his life so when he started on the TRT he gained his Muscle back really fast and almost over night due to the muscle memory he's built from the myonucei, was pretty cool to see. 

 I mean before the TRT my dad couldn't even shoulder press a broom stick behind his head without severe pain. 

Well I suppose it's more of a case of slowing down more due to not having as much free time and having to prioritize "Well I probably should sleep so I won't be trashed for work tomorrow." (Granted I don't sleep much anyway, but I still know you really need to at least try to sleep unfortunately)

For comparison I wrote Suzy in about a year and Ground Zero in about five months. Granted those aren't as big as Rogues or Eternal.

How long has soulless been in the works for now, and how much longer do you feel like you'll likely keep working on it for? Can't wait to read it. 

Well the original plan was to release it by the end of the year. That probably won't happen now, so the next date is after the next prompt contest deadline (Whenever that is next year since it usually gets extended)

It's an incredible amount of sustained effort though :D I think 3 months is the most I've spent on one story. I agree with what you say about the word count though, even though the writer turned out to be a pee-hole I thought Snow (deleted now) was a really well-written story with a very economical use of words. Ninjapitka also writes really good stories that I think are around the 30-50k mark. I still need to read Malk's story, everyone keeps saying how good it is!