The only servers that could be considered to be all one faction or the other, are Skeram, Stalagg, and Heartseeker. Skeram and Stalagg were some of the biggest Classic servers before they got free transfers. And Heartseeker was created by Skeram and Stalagg refugees.
It isn’t that every server needs to be perfectly balanced, but there is a tipping-point where the imbalance becomes intolerable. Any server where the imbalance exceeds 2-to-1, the minority faction seems to be transferring off, and once the imbalance nears 4-to-1, that trickle turns into a flood.
Well Thalnos is actually all horde, but I don’t count it because it is a dead server.
Point is, people have been transferring off badly imbalanced servers regardless of the size. At one time Stalagg, Skeram, and Heartseeker were something like the 6th-8th largest servers in NA. But regardless of their large population, their minority faction all transferred off. So yes, faction-balance seems to matter more than server size to most players.
This was only true at launch when server caps were closer to 10k. Server caps have since been reduced to around 6k last time I checked. And medium-pop servers are only peaking at about 3k concurrent users, which is less than the 4k in vanilla.
Source for all the data you seem to have regarding server populations? I don’t recall them ever stating what server caps are or where changed to at any point but maybe I missed it.
This sounds a lot more like playing a minority faction sucks not that playing a balanced faction ratio is better. Or if that was the case these horde dominates servers would see horde leaving as well to find a more balanced realm.
It was based on early census data. Concurrent players between horde and alliance seemed to be around 10k near launch(which is why we had layering). They seem to have slowly reduced server caps from 10k to what I think is around 6k based on census scans.
Presumably a medium-pop server referred to half of 10k(5k), which was bigger than vanilla server caps(3.5-4k from a Blizzard dev). So at launch a medium-pop was larger than the largest vanilla server, but not anymore.
I enjoy the disclaimer that the data is only as good as how many people upload their data.
Good for trends, but do you really think even close to most people are bothering with this?
I’m playing with this link and some factions don’t even show up at all lol. I have a char on Fairbanks and it claims 0 horde in February when loading Feb 7 to today.
Edit - I backed it out to Sept 1st to today and there are literally 2 horde data points from mid December to Mid March for horde Fairbanks. Apparently horde had < 500 concurrent players in February despite the server being horde favored.
From what I understand the queues are about 1k, and server caps are 6k. That means they have about 1k players that need to transfer, or 1/7th of the server.
According to Ironforge data, there are about 11.4k total raiders, so 1/7th is actually ~1600 raiders. Basically, as long as they are below ~9800 raiders there should be no queue.
If you go to the Ironforge.pro website, 32 out of 40 servers could absorb all of Incendius’ surplus without a queue.
Read what you wrote, and look at what they’re doing. Sounds like they want to save the low population realms. Why do medium population realms need anyone? sounds like low population needs the help and so does high population.
All that we need to look at is the trends and the peaks. Faerlina is a fairly balanced server, and it is showing both horde and alliance peaks at about 3k per faction. If you go to other servers and you compare faction-balance from ironforge data and then look at the faction peaks, all of them indicate a server cap of 6k. But if you look at early data, you can see that faction peaks were more like 5k, which indicates a server cap of 10k.
It seems to have been lowered in steps of about 1-2k, from 10k down to 6k. I noticed this when they got rid of layering because servers that hadn’t had a queue in weeks suddenly had one again.
It doesn’t need to be 100%. Even if you combined Anathema, Arcanite Reaper, and Thalnos together, it would still be around the 30th-largest server. And it would be 1554 alliance, 1964 horde. Which is about 44:56 alliance-to-horde ratio.
Just combining Thalnos with Earthfury would practically get you a balanced server, and would be roughly average size.
Blizzard could have merged Thalnos into Heartseeker a couple months ago and that would have basically balanced this server back then and prevented so many horde from transferring off.
And on the topic of merges, Blizzard could literally just merge Heartseeker back into Skeram and you would have pretty much a perfect 50/50 server, and still be smaller than Herod.
From the link you provided, this seems like a good idea.
I never hear people on Heartseeker complaining. Maybe they like their server.
Why would the people who paid money to get off of Skeram want to go back?
That’s the problem with mergers. Especially if it’s already a medium pop server. Some people actually like a medium pop server. You idea of mergers would effectively leave those people nowhere to go.
