Would you have preferred I use Applebees? Red Robin? A 5 star Country Club Steakhouse?
Even for the “business luch/diner” people, still being there 4 hours later(or being there again) is unusual. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but its rare.
Yes, WoW has “Marathon players” who can be online for 12+ hours at a time. I’ve even been that person, still am on occasion. I know they’re far more common in WoW than they would be in any kind of restaurant.
But by and large, I think you’d find “normal play” even in Vanilla was a play session of less than 4 hours at a time outside of raids and dungeons. Many sessions could be MUCH shorter. However, this is data that only Blizzard has to reference against.
Remember, hard core raiders, even raiders in general, made up only a fraction of the player base in Vanilla. People playing 4+ hours at a time consistently was almost always a hallmark of somebody who wound up either raiding, or doing extensive PvP.
But even going back to the “hard core raider” profile for a moment. Yes, many go for alts once they’ve “beat the game” or otherwise maxxed out their available progress on their main. But many others simply curtail their playing time. Which “shifts the population numbers” in regards to how concurrency correlates to player population on a realm that is on the edge of having login queues.
The above was in the context of live(Vanilla), where everything you’ve done isn’t going to turn into vapor in just a couple months. Beta has the “little issue” of things turning into vapor sometime in August, which greatly discourages people doing everything they can conceive of on their toon when stuck at a progression block.
End result: Players greatly reducing their time in game if uninterested in alts. Concurrency rates drop, but total number of players logging in may not “significantly” change in that they may still log in daily, but now they’re only on for 5 to 30 minutes, then back offline again, rather than being online for 4+ hours.
Which gets into a side-issue of the “business end” of things where companies like Activision actually DON’T want you playing for 16 hours a day if you’re on a subscription. As they have to dedicate resources to hosting your gameplay. Resources they’d rather “spread around” multiple players(overbooking), which they cannot do if you’re almost always online.
Instead, from the finance end, they want you logging in daily(demonstrates you’re “committed” to the game), doing a handful of tasks, playing for anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple hours, then log out. Once you are offline, the resources they used to host you can then be used to host someone else, thus maximizing their ROI on hardware. Sound like established/encouraged gameplay behaviors that can be found somewhere?
But getting back on the general topic: Population “churn” over the course of a day on a realm is a LOT more significant than many people think it is, even the healthy ones. This is an even bigger factor in regards to Layering at launch than “the tourists” are, because player schedules will change over the span of just days in most cases, weeks in the case of a select few. But until those “binge sessions” end, realm concurrency is going be very difficult to manage around because of that.
Of course, I also one other data point that wowclassicpopulation.com does NOT have. I have a (manual) census from the Morning of May 26th, and it covers all realms, all factions. (An advantage to focusing play on the PVE realm, I can delete and recreate characters on the pvp realm server at will)
I reported 521 online, on a Sunday morning playing alliance on the 26th. classicpopulation starts their tracking at the end of May. 7 days and not quite 2 hours layer, Classicpopulation counts 425 people online playing Alliance PvP, with no horde data. and no PvE data A decrease of about 100 players from what I’d reported a week earlier, during an earlier time of the day.
Level cap was increased on the 4th of June however, and that evening witnessed a peak Alliance population of 641. A number which hasn’t been matched since from user submissions. Wednesday saw numbers in line with my Sunday morning report of 521, with it ranging between 495 players and 544.
The other thing you can’t really see easily from the displayed data, but the people gathering census data can see. Especially if they have Census+ running very aggressively(5 minute interval between sweeps), is how “spiky” the population concurrency actually is. Seeing population swings of +/- 20 players in the span of just 10 minutes is actually very common.
So again, “player population churn” o_ver the course of even a single day_ is far more common than most might think it is.
The other thing to bolster that assertion? Ion’s Developer Insights video linke to on post 23.
If anybody knows how many people have participated in the Beta Test, blizzard should, and as the Classic Dev Team reports to him, he should certainly be in the know on that.
Concurrency gives us a minimum threshold for what the population could be. Raw character counts gives us an idea of where the maximum is(but characters invariably end up being missed), it’s a whole lot of “fuzzy logic” to extrapolate where things fall between the two ranges. Unless you’re Blizzard and have all of the data.