So after taking a break from classic I wanted to check in on some characters on live.
Can some explain this sharding/layering/warmode stuff to me??
So emerald dream has always been considered a high pop server, and is still marked as high pop by the game and by US realm pop websites. Yet it’s 10 times more dead than the characters I have on medium-low servers !?!?
Literally not one person in Goldshire in both warmode off or on.
Also on a medium realm of mine, Misha, both Stormwind and Org have 10x more players in them?
Yeah, it is but can we really blame them? Low numbers look really bad.
It’s like back in WoD when there was an almost 40% sub loss, that was the last quarter that Blizzard thought that the number of players playing WoW was a bad metric to judge the success of the expansion off of.
The server population label isn’t based on character counts or any “overall” number like that, it’s based on how many people are actively online at the time. I don’t know if it’s quite a real time update on the selection screen, but it’s pretty damn close if not. Probably updates every handful of minutes or something. If it says Emerald Dream is at a Higher population status than another realm, then it has more people online at the time. Simple as that.
The server population label doesn’t tell you faction balance. Emerald Dream may have a lot of players online, but it’s also literally the most balanced realm of those that have over ~200k total characters (it’s at ~400k – for comparison: WRA is ~407k, Area 52 is 566k, and the Steamwheedle Cartel/Sentinels/Kirin Tor cluster is a combined ~196k). That means either side is going to be proportionally less busy compared to it’s total population vs basically any other realm. MOST realms are heavily skewed one way or the other. Especially high pop realms.
Emerald Dream is an RPPvP server and probably the go-to for both Roleplayers who don’t want to be on WRA/MG and for World PvP enthusists. Or at least it was for a long time, I don’t know if that’s changed. What that means is there is a very distinct split between Warmode On and Warmode Off, more than there is on a lot of other realms. Which can easily make the population seem smaller than a realm that’s actually smaller but has something like an 80/20 WM split. Although IIRC SW/Org are weird about it and shouldn’t be sharding for WM, but Blizzard has been historically wishy washy about sharding rules in capital cities on RP servers, so I don’t really know for sure currently.
Leveling Zones (see: Goldshire/Elwynn) being dead isn’t a realm population issue. Most people are max level and doing things in max level zones. People leveling alts are often starting at 20 right now because of Allied Races. Even if they opt to level something from 1, it goes by so fast and people aren’t really stuck in one location for long. And probably more importantly: RP Servers don’t CRZ in old content, so if you’re comparing Goldshire on ED to literally any non-RP realm or to an anomaly like Moon Guard, you’re getting a heavily skewed picture.
In Blizzard’s defense (kinda), I’ve actually lost track of if the current thresholds for realm population statuses are “higher” or “lower” than “normal”. They’ve changed it a GOOD handful of times over the last 2 expansions for various reasons. It’s totally possible they’ve currently lowered the thresholds to make things look better, but I know for a fact they’ve also done the opposite at some point, so tbh I doubt that’s something they do for the sake of appearances.
The only change I’d like to see to the Realm Selection window is to visually identify Connected Realms. It should be obvious which realms are linked and the data should be for the total of the cluster, not for individual realms (I don’t know if it is or not right now).
That and maybe add a “Locked” population status for realms that currently have a queue. I’d say just change “Full” to mean there is a queue and adjust things accordingly, but people are used to “Full” basically just meaning “Very High”.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but tbh most people are not and have not been familiar with how many people are USUALLY online at the same time. Census addons on Moon Guard Alliance end up reporting like 2000-2500 people most days (even when BfA was newer). Tack on the like 900 Horde playing and you still have < 3000 sometimes. Any “Doomsayer” would take that number and freak, despite it being a very healthy realm in terms of population. People don’t have a frame of reference for that sort of thing.
I suppose using the term healthy would determine from what era you use the term. BfA has really low numbers, you seem to know what you’re talking about so you would know this.
Tbh I don’t recall Censuses being that much higher on MG last expansion, but I don’t have any hard data on that so fair enough. I’d wager that most of the realms in the top 10 or so probably get enough transfers/rerolls from dead/dying realms to keep them closer to “normal” than other realms tbh, but that’s speculation for sure.
But also, BfA today vs like ~3 months ago is probably a decent chunk down on it’s own. ESO xpack, FFXIV xpack, Classic’s hyped release is ongoing, and people have had amble time to decide if 8.2 “saved” BfA or not (it didn’t – for at least the forum community). Numbers were probably decent enough before all of that, even if lower than the past (but “lower than the past” is also a safe assumption for WoW since like 2012, so that doesn’t say much).
Since we’re on the topic of total population decline though, let me just throw out that the decline from the beginning of Cata to the last recorded subs in WoD were basically linear if you account for the highest and lowest points being new releases and content lulls. WoD didn’t decline any faster than normal as far as we saw, it just got an unprecedented # of players returning at launch, because the entire thing was marketed as Nostalgia: The Expansion, even moreso than Classic. Ideally they would have kept more people for longer, but it was inevitable that people coming back based on nostalgia-based marketing wouldn’t stick around long-term.
Not saying the decline is -still- linear (if it were – we would have hit 0 during Uldir IIRC), but if anything I’d wager it’s slowed down when looking at big picture stuff rather than quarterly stuff, rather than sped up. Simply because that’s the nature of this kind of thing. You approach 0, things slow down.
I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about or who you even are. I have never once posted on the Classic forum for you to ever see me there for me to “go back”. lol
You might be experiencing sharding. I know in modern WOW I almost never see people out in the world that are from my server. It’s actually a huge bummer and a big plus in Classic.
I mean, you fit right in with the classic doomsayers. I haven’t seen a positive thread or reply from you. You’re always bemoaning something about retail.
well said!