The numbers were definitely accurate. The addon scanned /who using all kinds of filters to get all the numbers. Like when you do a /who warrior 60 and it shows 50, that usually means there are more than 50 total. From there, you can do a /who z-“Undercity” c-“Warrior” r-“Undead” and so on to further narrow down the list. You can even start searching for names with it too. Do that with enough filtering and you’ll pretty much never hit the 50+ cap on the list. That’s how they obtained such accurate statistics.
I definitely agree! You’d think that people would have been happy that it was roughly a 50/50 server. That was one thing that I was super excited about on Stalagg, but now it feels like it’s 90/10 H/A…
Accurate? Yes and no. People tend to ignore the built in assumptions that this kind of census taking requires.
In terms of identifying the number of distinct characters on a server? Sure, as long as enough people were running scans and uploading them over a fairly extended timeframe. People’s free time varies, some people only play weekends, some people weekdays, some middle of the day, some night owls, etc. To get a better feel, you’d probably need close to 2 weeks of hourly scanning. And people’s play patterns are going to change a lot in the month post-release, with tourists leaving, people deciding to change servers, and so on. If a server was only being scanned by a handful of people, only at certain times of day, you might be missing a large enough chunk of population to seriously skew the results. I saw an early census where a few servers had something like a 98%/2% split Alliance-Horde ratio. Since overall numbers were small, it was a much better assumption that the large side was being scanned by a small number, and the small side almost not at all.
Further, it counts logged in characters, not accounts. We can talk about average characters per account, amount people tend to play acts, when people normally play acts, etc., but that’s all baseless speculation. No way for anyone other that Blizzard to track those things that I know of, and they’re keeping their mouths shut.
Well, can you blame them? If my option is to stay on a 60/40 server as the minority, or move to a 60/40 server as a majority, I’m picking being the Majority every time.
Being unable to get world boss kills unless the other faction decides to let you is crap.
There is no motivatation to play the underdog with BGs being cross realm. I know a lot of entire pvp guilds that rerolled sides because the queue times were too high on one faction. When Xrealm came out, they all rolled back when TBC launched.
The whole thing is Blizzard’s fault for not taking into consideration how important faction balance is in Classic. World bosses are a thing, and world pvp is a thing.
Agreed, but mostly leans toward the yes part. Are they going to be super accurate at guessing total accounts playing? No. Some people might have 2 characters, others might have 10, some people might play on one account, some might play on five, and so on. These statistics get more and more accurate as people get higher level too. Counting a bunch of level 5 characters would be pointless because that’s not really any investment in time. If it’s counting characters above 25 or so, that’s showing that these are probably longer term characters and therefore, more relevant to the count.
However, it is pretty accurate for judging server balance, especially on pvp servers where you can’t make characters on the opposite faction. If you run a few scans per day and you see that the server mostly has a 60:40 ratio, that’s probably going to continue to hold true. There isn’t some magic hour that all the alliance or horde all log in. It’s going to be pretty statistically stable throughout the day.
I initially rolled on Stalagg, I was among the first people to start playing on the server, I started playing within seconds of the “Enter World” button turning red. Horde outnumbered us at least 3:1 in every contested zone. That was before any unofficial statistics were released, I was not influenced by them. I’m telling you what I saw, and other people have been saying what they saw, and you refuse to believe us. We saw that ally were outnumbered at least 3:1, often much worse than that in highly contested zones like STV. I did all of my lowbie STV leveling on Stalagg, and that was a nightmare. You had to be in a group of 5 to even have a chance at not being ganked in a high traffic troll quest encampment, and even then wr would eventually succumb to multitudes of ungrouped horde just strolling in and 10v5ing us.
We’re telling you what our experience was, and you throughout have denied that there is/was a heavy faction imbalance. It wasn’t caused by allly abandonment, it was always there.
Edit: And yes, my entire guild transferred to Heartseeker.
You paint a silly picture considerting how the leading wave of levelers, at least for the Alliance, were busy raiding 5 man dungeons for faster leveling. STV was a ghost town. All of the normally congested PvP zones were empty.
Maybe the Horde weren’t as aware of the faster method to level and eventually became an issue.
But this is what I know now.
In spite of the now worse imbalance thanks to you and everyone else that transfered, the Alliance dominate organized pvp. Most members of my guild are leveling alts and many have them at 60 already. Did PvP happen along the way? Of course it did. But it didn’t slow us down and even now with transfers opening again we aren’t considering in the slightest to transfer off.
So really, I don’t relate at all, or see the logic, in you and your guild’s choice to jump ship. I think it makes more sense that you fell for what I said in the OP. Which was a misinformation campaign.
It’s either that, or you really are just that scared of PvP. In which we wouldn’t have wanted you anyways.
What misinformation? The unofficial stats showed a heavy horde imbalance. There was a heavy horde imbalance. It’s not misinformation if it’s true. Again you deny what we saw.