They probably don’t know either.
It’ll be the day before launch and they’ll be sitting in a board meeting, and one intern bringing them coffee will inquire, “Do we know how many realms there will be? How many of each type, and so on?”
One board member will spew their coffee in surprise, and everyone will turn their heads to look at this uncouth swine who dares to ask questions. The camera pans to the top floor of a tall building. A window shatters, and out flies the intern, falling to his death.
Ion brushes his hands together, then places them on his hips, seemingly very proud of himself. “That takes care of that,” he says. The unquestionable will of Blizzard cannot be challenged, even by those within.
However, he’s screaming internally. How could he forget?! This always happens. He dismisses the board, adjourning the meeting, no one the wiser. As the last member leaves the room, he closes it behind them, and immediately pulls out his cell phone. He calls marketing.
Why marketing? Well, that’s what the game is entirely designed around, of course! They and their spreadsheets know best.
“How many people are going to play Classic? We need to know now so we’ll have the realms ready!” he asks.
“Well, it’s impossible to know, sir. The subscriptions are shared, so it’s difficult to really gauge if people are subscribing to BfA or Classic. We also don’t know for sure how many of our current BfA players will be trying Classic, nor do we know how many of them will stay. As best we can tell–” a voice on the other end of the line buzzes.
Ion throws his phone out the window. He mutters under his breath, “Worthless.”
He turns his head and sees a whiteboard with a graph of the subscriber count. The numbers aren’t looking so good. Aside from small spikes each expansion and major content patch, there’s a downward trend. ‘MMOs are dead. This genre is done for,’ Ion thinks to himself.
He notices the upwards trend starting from the game’s original launch up through the early months of Cataclysm. It hurts his eyes. He wipes the line away with the eraser. Finally, the picture before him is perfect; the answer is clear.
“Ten realms. Four normal, four PvP, two RP,” he mutters. That should be enough to accommodate the entire player base, based on what he sees by this very informative graph.
He folds his arms across his chest, nodding proudly to himself. Easy. He writes down that information. No one was paying attention during that board meeting, anyway. Its members cared more about profits than proper game design, so all the details of Classic went in one ear and out the other. They wouldn’t notice that one more thing they didn’t cover was in the meeting summary report.
He turns to leave the room and stops himself. Quickly he returns to the notepad and scribbles “And 5 realms for EU. Two normal, two PvP, one RP. They all speak the same language anyway, so that’s more than enough.”
Finally, he leaves the room. As he closes the door, he sighs happily, a job well done.