You are correct, I did a Census on Gehennas yesterday at 20.00 CET, there were 2600 players online on Horde. ( so maybe at best another 2400 on the Alliance?)
This is by no means terribly low ofcourse, but we are talking a ‘MEGA’ LOCKED server at almost peak time…
(is Census not counting players from different layers properly?)
Also the AH seemed a lot lower all week.
I understand that these random tests don’t have a 100% accuracy ofcourse. (some servers have more people relogging, some servers have more people posting junk items on the AH, and so on.)
The point however is, that servers like Shazzrah and Earthshaker seem to have at WORST a few players MORE now and they are still not even marked FULL.
Second point : If this data is somewhat correct, which I suspect it is, do you really NEED layers and LOCKED realms for 5000 players? Even when more players will be returning for a patch, because like I said, some high realms already have more players ANYWAY.
At the very least Blizzard could inform and act way faster than they do, which is nothing new ofcourse.
@Shocknorris: Did you happen to screen shot your scan and/or make note of the time census took you? I am asking, because the forced manual operation of the CP and CPC addons means that the run times have increased massively. This means that shorter scans are automatically more accurate than very long ones (long ones giving even lower number than the reality).
Nope I haven’t made a screenshot but your input is appreciated. I will definitely do so the next time I will run a Census. Thank you very kindly.
P.S. I don’t EXACTLY remember the run time of the scan, but it was close to 45 minutes for that 2600 player ‘found’ scan.
P.S. 2 : I just found out that I made a screenshot of a Census I ran on Razorgore-horde and it found 1912 players in only a 23 min scan, so what you said seems very accurate indeed.
@Shocknorris: Both of those time figures are high enough that accuracy is already degraded significantly (in other words the results you got are too low).
Because Classic has far fewer races and race / class combinations, CPC is more accurate than CP in all cases where scan time exceeds about two minutes of constant oversight. Even so, any increase past about five minutes is already a problem, but since Blizzard has altered how API is accessible, the current formats of CP and CPC are the best that are available for retail and Classic, respectively.
To oversimplify, if your scan takes more than about two to three minutes of constant action, you are guaranteed that the end result is too low in comparison to reality and the degree of error increases as time grows longer. However, the error is not linear (different races take different amount of time to process, due to both actual numbers and the difference in race/class combos), so estimating it is not easy.
@Shocknorris: In overall terms, the best method is combining knowledge (whenever possible with a personal component) from several sources. When I can, I use at least three different ways of looking into things. CPC scan can function as a source, another is to look at what others have submitted to
Based on just those last two (as I have no access to Gehennas myself) I would say Gehennas has around 12 000 to 15 000 active horde characters and at least 7 500 active alliance characters. How many people does that translate into? This is mostly guesswork, because I lack certain critical data points, but I would say at least 4 000 on the alliance side and maybe 7 000 to 9 400 on the horde side. That in turn would correspond to a prime time peak of maybe 1 800 to 2 500 alliance and perhaps 3 000 to 3 750 horde… Which would mean that Gehennas is still slightly above the critical level at prime time peak, but possibly by fairly little.
So from this data you can basically see that the locked servers are not up to date?
Yes Gehennas is the most play server, but why are servers like Auberdine and Zandalari Tribe still locked while bigger servers like Noggenfogger, Earthshanker and Razorgore have open paid transfers?
@Happyminttu: Things are not quite as straightforward as you seem to think. Gehennas does have the (currently 2nd highest after the German Venoxis) raider base lead, but raiders do not represent all of the player base and even at prime time peak, only part of the player base is concurrently active.
This leads to a situation, where a smaller realm can have a larger prime time peak even though it has lower average and less total people.
Let me try to demonstrate (numbers made up for purpose of example):
Realm A, at 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00: CCUs 4 000, 2 000, 3 500, 5 800. No problems, no queue, no need for layers.
Realm B, same times: CCUs 1 000, 250, 1 250, 8 000, either has a long queue or is layered (and possibly also locked).
So it is not only important how many in total, but how many when it is busy.
According to ironforge pro data there are around 8700 people currently raiding which obviously doesn’t include players that don’t raid but does include people that raid twice or more on their alts for some of the population.
This number is lower than the population numbers before the lockdown.
I understand the idea of limiting new players to start on a full server, but why this is applied to the people who already have a character on a locked server…
I don’t see how preventing character transfers from other servers to their main servers would harm the general population of the realm…
Please do something , my main is stuck on a dead server (Judjement) while all my other characters are on Ashbringer …
PS: All the horde side from judgement transfered to Ashbringer because blizzard didnt do anything about the “dead server” situation and now ashbringer is lock because too much people …great…
I truly understand your frustration and by now they should have really given you guys free transfers, even Gandling turned medium pop yesterday, so a few 100 players shouldn’t be that much of an issue to spread over lets say Skullflame,Dreadmist,Ten Storms and/or some other realms.
And if after all of that some players will still whine that their precious nickname is already in use, tough luck, you can’t have everything obviously…
Atleast it would show some good will from Blizzards side, which wouldn’t be so bad for them after the huge amount of errors they have made in the last 2 years.
It still baffles me how people can say ‘but Blizzard needs to make money for shareholders’. In this case : Oh really? So how does this help Blizzard/Shareholders when there is a big percentage of WoW classic ONLY players whom (luckily so far, hehe) can’t even spend their money on mounts in classic WoW.
Except if they want this game to fail as soon as possible ofcourse, but even then, what is the point of losing a percentage of customers who will not come back for Shadowlands anyway…
Edit: ofcourse allowing you a paid transfer to a server you already have characters on would also be pretty much a normal thing.
There was long waiting queues during COVID, but then Bliz locked server Auberdine (the ONLY normal French server) … Now the server is almost empty on levels < 40 : impossible to find any group. No more dungeon or elite quest on evenings except levbel 60. Tonight I was the ONLY ONE player in Hinterlands !!! Reopen at least transfer and let create some new players please . The server is locked for so long that we have only 60 level players and few rerolls