Once you listen to this and think about it, and I mean think about it without any bias; you’ll see that I’m right.
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The census addon is not broken. The census addon still reports 99.9% accurately. You can download the census addon and use it to get a concurrent online player count at prime-time, any day of the week. You’ll find that there are only a handful of servers that break 3,000 concurrent users.
I’ve already done this myself, no one believes me; you can do it yourself too.
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/censusplusclassic
Herod Horde, Sunday at 1:41 P.M:
https://i.imgur.com/JqX0VKR.png
With the Alliance it would have been about 3,500 players. Servers DO NOT have 3-5 times the population of vanilla servers. EDIT: Medium servers do not have double the population of Full Vanilla servers either.
I am not certain how you can make this claim since Blizzard actively made changes to limit what data addons can pull as far as number of players are online. I realize the alterations were to break people’s ability to abuse layer hoping (determining who was actively in their layer) but the functionality was never restored. Currently the census addons have to use a self reporting mechanism, and then extrapolate averages from there, such as what ironforge.pro does, or they have to use a workaround method where you leave the player search window open and it tries to poll the data that way. Since we are still relying on Blizzard to provide that data, we have no way to determine if that data is limited still or not. Therefore we cannot actually determine that this data is 99.9% accurate.
I am definitely not trying to make the claim that the realms have 3 to 5 times the player base. However, we have confirmation from CMs that the realms at launch were larger, we know that they limited player search functionality in the API and we cannot confirm one way or another that the current work arounds are actually providing us with accurate data. We have no confirmation from CMs about population one way or the other since.
As for your video with Kaplan responding to the %1 metric, I don’t know what that proves really. It definitely disproves the 1% myth, but he doesn’t actually give any other numbers there. As we know, there were definitely more realms in Vanilla. He discusses the number of raiders in vanilla as a whole, but I didn’t see any realm specific metrics. The issue with using this as a bench mark, and attempting to extrapolate from there, is that we don’t know how many people are currently raiding in Classic, and if we did, we still wouldn’t know how that was dispersed over the current number of servers we have.
If I have any of this wrong, or I am missing your point, please let me know. I promise I won’t throw any ad hominems at you simply to try to win the discussion.
Blizzard made the automatic SendWho() a protected function. The addon now uses hardware input (left and right mouse clicks) to send ManualWho() requests.
We sure do, we can open the window and see exactly what the addon is doing. When it reaches a 50 player result, it searches with additional parameters, E.g:
/who r- “Undead” c- “Warlock” n-y 60-60
Things change.
No, they didn’t.
Yes, we can.
I asked for people to really listen to that video. He said that most guilds only raided one night a week and that servers were having 500-700 people every night of the week (more on weekends) in Molten Core at prime-time. That’s 10+ unique guilds a day raiding Molten Core. That’s 70+ guilds per server, what percentage of people playing the game do you think raided Molten Core back in 2005 compared to today?
I wish consumables were cheap AF as well, but you only need flasks to parse, guilds can still steamroll this content without world buffs or consumables.
Would be nice to only spend 150 gold for a full raid weeks of consumables, but it aint gonna happen.
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I appreciate your level responses. I will look into your above claims. This one specifically though:
He provides these numbers but he absolutely didn’t say these were server specific numbers or averages per server, or really quantify what they meant exactly. Given the player numbers at the time I am more inclined to believe these numbers are totals across all servers as opposed to averages. That said, it still doesn’t really prove anything about vanilla populations vs current populations? He gives us averages for any particular night in the US. As I said, there were a lot more vanilla realms than there are classic realms. So we could get the number of realms at the time of this video and then Divide Mr. Kaplan’s numbers up among them, which would give us an average per realm. The trouble here is we don’t have any data for averages from Blizzard for classic to compare it to? Please let me know if I am incorrect there. Again, maybe I am still just missing your point with this video, but I still don’t think it proves anything one way or the other.
Edit: As a follow up to your other responses.
This is a known change to the API that we can track because we can see the change in the API that confirms SendWho() was moved to a protected function, yes. ManualWho() still works with hardware input. Agreed.
Yes, we can see what the addon is doing, but we don’t have any way of confirming that data is accurate at this point. We are assuming it is, since it’s coming from Blizzard, but we don’t know how the backend responds to multiple requests of this type at this point. For all we know, once an obvious attempt to poll useable census data from a server (multiple specific requests) is detected, measured results are given. That’s the problem, we just don’t know what was changed on the back end.
They certainly do. Can you please provide the quote from an official source stating that this has changed in particular? I can’t find one.
They absolutely did, you confirmed it yourself above with the move of SendWho() to a protected function. That was a change we could track. We have no way to confirm changes we cannot track.
Please provide an official source stating that our current census data is 99.9% accurate as you claimed above. I can’t find one.
not wasting my time on that, i know im right 
Typical response from someone who has posted zero evidence besides “I know I’m right.”
you have no evidence either
I sure do, you just refuse to acknowledge it.
Confirmation bias at it’s finest.
where is your evidence?
that video is from 2014 you are an idiot if you think that can prove anything about classic
…
Are you for real?
yes i am for real. not watching a video from 2014 that will never prove anything about classic servers populations
It’s from Blizzcon 2005.
Jeff Kaplan says the following:
- On a lot of servers, there are 500-700 people in Molten Core at prime-time, every night of the week.
- He says these are almost entirely unique players and guilds, because most guilds only do Molten Core one night a week.
- On the weekend, there are 50% more players in Molten Core than there are during the week.
We know that raiding was not nearly as accessible in 2005 as it is now. From this, we can assume that a much larger percentage of the playerbase is raiding now.
Using the numbers provided by Kaplan, we can see that “many” servers had 70+ guilds raiding Molten Core at the time of Blizzcon 2005.
How many guilds do Medium population servers have raiding Molten Core on Classic? Keep in mind that raiding is much more accessible and we’re talking about server population, not raiding population.
TL;DR: Servers are not vastly more populated than they were in Vanilla. This is a fact, no one has provided any evidence otherwise besides an outdated statement from Blizzard pre-removal of layering.
classic server hold 10k + people, much more than vanilla
I don’t deal in conspiracy theories.
Source? You have provided zero evidence. I can provide evidence to the contrary.
I don’t think you are understanding my point…
I’m completely understanding it; you’re wrong.