When server population are all ‘low’ it doesn’t help new players figure out which of the servers has 7000+ players and which has 0.
Perhaps it would be worth making the value relative per mode? The function could adjust on like the total players and the most populated cluster, so that the ‘high’ is always helping guide new players to the most populated areas for that game mode.
At the moment for era US the most populated clusters would be whitemane ‘high’ (6k+ raiding toons), mankrik ‘medium’ (2-6k raiding toons), and the rest low.
I think this is because of the changes they made with SoD where servers can hold a lot more people and because Era is all clustered. So I completely agree, it would be good if there was a way to show a more meaningful population per server. Even if it was just another column or something indicating activity, preferrably with the ability to differentiate based on faction.
I think it would really help new people coming into Era as well so they dont’ accidentally end up on a dead server and having to reroll later when they figure it out.
I don’t have a source for it, and I’m at work so I can’t really dedicate the time to find it, but I recall reading from Aggrend or Fwoibles that the “Low”, “Medium”, “High” numbers are relative to the highest population server available in the list.
So if Wild Growth has 20,000 players for example, it will be listed as “High” (Full is probably relative to server capacity) and all servers lower than this amount will be listed as Low, Medium, or High based on the percentage of population they contain relative to Wild Growth.
Now where this does not make sense to me, is that I’m nearly positive I’ve seen a server list where all servers were listed as low or medium. So if the above is true, then the calculation update for the highest population server must be intermittent, rather than on the fly. Once a day? Once a week? I’m not sure.
I’d have to find more chatter on f’ing twitter to verify.
Needless to say, the server capacity message in the server list is the last resource I would personally use to determine a server’s population.
New players, and even veterans exploring the classic ecosystem, seem to often struggle to figure out which Era servers have players and which are ghosts towns.
At the moment all Era servers are listed as ‘low’ so they may as well use this already existing ‘population’ value to help players make better decisions about which server to play on.
If this is the case, then perhaps SoD servers are being mixed with Era servers and thus causing all the Era ones to go to ‘low’. Before SoD the populated Era servers were usually medium, and I’m not sure but perhaps they even hit high pop for a bit. Same with hardcore.
It seemed one day they all went to low at the same time and never adjusted again.
