You’re conflating two different things. 30k accounts on Herod does not mean 30k active players at a single given time. Per Nost’s year 1 statistics, they had 130k active accounts and their peak online activity was almost exactly 1/10th of that. That’s an international community operating at different time zones (although I would argue that the pserver community is also likely a more hardcore crowd on average which would cut the other way) but even if it’s double that ratio, 30k accounts (and I still have no idea where these numbers are coming from or if they’re even close to real) only translates to 6k players at peak.
I obviously can’t predict that it will but I don’t see how you could have any information one way or another. We simply don’t know the numbers and we can’t predict how populations might trend in a launch like this. It’s a game launching in a very unique situation.
Prices should stabilize. If we pay more, then we can also sell for more. With layering it means we’ll actually have more resources in the beginning phase. We might have 3 times as many resources if we outnumber them three fold. Just need to keep the gold re-seller/farmers out. We don’t need currency manipulators!
i mean it could very well be removed, but i would sit there and laugh at there ques while it happens. pretty much every streamer is on faerlina. place is going to be a mad house.
Nost was free, and it also was a private server. I dont think you will be able to compare that to this. I do though wonder what the active players to active accounts on a server generally is.
I still think all the servers, at least the PvP ones will end up with a queue early on. With the obvious 2 being extremely long lines
dynamic respawn code fixes this issue
dynamic respawns does not make it so you can have 10k online on a 2.5k server.
Nost realm had 6k -13k (concurrent) and they survived just fine
Not everyone sits in the one zone btw - and for launch layering will ease zone density
nost realms were objectively not vanilla like. sorry not sorry. and their dynamic spawns were not like blizzards either.
Get used to long queue times after phase 1
You are missing what is being discussed in the quote. The issue is once layering is GONE and a server has 9k players active at any time resources are going to be scarce as the population consumption to availability is 3 times greater than on a 3k active pop.
They’ll have several weeks to see trend lines before that happens. If it looks like servers are going to be too full, they can always add a couple more. Much easier to add in a server if it is needed than to deal with server mergers if a realm dies.
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I am remembering. I also know they went above the cap but not by 22k, no.
Ding ding ding, you win the internets sir
I am saying player actively playing on there server… not the cap.
High pop vanilla server had a population of around 15-25k, with a 3k cap.
Nost had between 10k and 15k at peak times.
You’re dancing around the point as well, what happens with layering when whatever the cap is, is reached?
Do they increase the cap of the server when they plan on removing layering?
Is their a limit to what the cap should be? If that cap is reached do they split the community for the health of the server while at the same time dividing the community and relationships built?
So many variables and holes, I don’t see the point of layering beyond the starting zones. I think it causes more problems than it solves.
@ Hammis - Go look it up lol, it is estimated that vanilla servers had a server pop max of 3k.
As far as me saying 30 seperate servers, you do realize there was 40+ PvP servers back when Vanilla was out?
get rekt’d kid
i mean we just got a new server added today, i expect there to be one or two more possible additions, server caps are probably set to 20k loads at peak hours but blizzard has the money and resources and server capabilities to do much much more if they feel it is required, so i wouldnt worry too much
Considering we are talking about Classic and not vanilla not sure how what you said is relevant.
But we can talk about vanilla. Using wayback machine we can see WoW census data counting characters (level 10+) on servers within a 30 day time period.
In 2006 we can see large servers counting 25k characters. By 2007 before TBC large servers have 30k+ characters. Again if we say every account can have 10 characters that they actively log onto so they can be counted then 10 characters = 1 account. So yeah 30k characters would max out to about 3k accounts.
That would be the lowest estimate possible since some of those full vanilla servers where pvp. On the pve considering an account could technically make 20 characters on a server we could say a 30k characters vanilla server could have as so as 1.5k accounts.
But if we used the high estimate of 1 character = 1 account then we are talking about 30k accounts. So somewhere between 3k-30k accounts for a full vanilla server. If for some reason you want to demand that the low esitmate is the right one, then I do not care.
I think the more important point is that we don’t know what the numbers are for classic servers. I responded to your made up numbers with some of my own (but I think mine are better).
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But for vanilla we have another way to look at things. Lets say old wow subscription numbers are about right. And lets use your made up number of 3k accounts max on a server.
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So that means we need about 300 servers to hold 1 million accounts. But lets say before TBC they had 7 million subs. that would require 2100 servers if they where capped at 3k.
I don’t even think vanilla Wow has every had 300 servers let alone 2100. But lets say there where 300 servers before TBC. 7.5million subs / 300 server = 25k per server.
EDIT: I was off by an order of magnitude at the end there, fixed.
I ended up being way too interested in if this question could be solved.
I took the server status from the official page and the character counts from realmpop for retail servers.
Minimum character counts for each type of realm is:
Low: 100k
Med: 120k
High: 155k
Full: 180k
If I take the average values instead of the min, and then look at an average of 3-6 characters per account, the results look like this:
(numbers were all rounded to nearest 5k for character count)
| Low | Medium | High | Full | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Realm Count | 18 | 159 | 33 | 25 |
| Characters | Average | 140,000 | 175,000 | 265,000 |
| Max | 160,000 | 330,000 | 395,000 | 670,000 |
| Min | 100,000 | 120,000 | 155,000 | 180,000 |
| 3 char/acc | 46,667 | 58,333 | 88,333 | 125,000 |
| 4 char/acc | 35,000 | 43,750 | 66,250 | 93,750 |
| 5 char/acc | 28,000 | 35,000 | 53,000 | 75,000 |
| 6 char/acc | 23,333 | 29,167 | 44,167 | 62,500 |
If I had to pick a number, I’d say a full server is around 80k unique accounts.