New Realm Connections are Underway

It seems it will, Either Lich king or Booty bay but we won’t know until blizzard confirms it, which ever Blackscar doesn’t get is going to Goldrinn.

Both BootyBay and LichKing are transfer locked which suggests that blizzard is preparing them to be decommissioned, Goldrinn & Blackscar have been also named in the maintenance schedule which suggests these will be the new host servers for those realms…

Russian realm connection/Maintenance page would be posted here:

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Thank you for the response Jånek and clarifying the possible realm connections.

The idea of connecting them again isn’t impossible as they’re still considered high, not full (actually there are only 2 high pop russian clusters at the moment)

However it seems like the maintenance notice doesn’t mention the realms already connected to Blackscar (Borean Tundra, Grom and Thermaplugg) which should be down as well if it’s taken down.

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Its now been confirmed: Lich king is going to Goldrinn, Booty Bay is going to blackscar :slight_smile:

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Official English realm post for those who might have missed it:

Hi Janek, when do you think we’ll get the first indication of the next set of realms to be connected?

I keep on hoping for Connected Kul’Tiras to be next, as arguably we’re in worse shape than the realms just announced.

Thursday/Friday (more likely Friday for EU) :slight_smile:

Thank you; you’re a legend.

I have been keeping track of when they pop.
They normally come up here first, around friday/saturday : https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/breaking/21898767

And then announced “public” monday/tuesday.

Maintenance posts are usually posted Sunday afternoon, Forum posts come on Monday or Tuesday…

The first major hints though come Thursday/Friday the week before when they block off the servers they are about to decommission to realm transfers and other character services, this will only affect half the realms they are about to connect but it will give us an idea what that half is and how many connections we should expect to see that week.

The next big hint is obviously Sunday when the maintenance pages go up, usually they will list all the realms there, but they have only done this for EU/KR realms, its usually omitted on the US maintenance list until later and they don’t even use those maintenance pages in the TW region.

And finally the forum posts are usually posted Monday/Tuesday to confirm everything, usually we know what is being connected before then but there are cases where there are 2 connections of the same type of realm in the same data centre as happened with the Russian servers this week where we won’t get confirmation until that’s posted.

Thats kinda how it works, hope that sheds some insight :slight_smile:

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How do you check this just curious, checking every single server if you can trasnfer there? :smiley:

Basically yeah,

As a tip use a character that you haven’t played in a while and you will never be taken to the payment page since that error will block it, but you will see the realm error first.

You can try it out yourself, try transferring a toon to Bronzebeard, and then try any other server thats not being connected, you will see what I mean :slight_smile:

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Surprised to see Stormscale/Outland being listed as full pop now. Stormscale is not that surprising since it shifted between high and full pop some weeks ago. But Outland is a surprise since Ravencrest/Ragnaros are both still listed as high… Guess I’ll never truly understand the passive/active population number…

Could be that they adjusted the Algorithm on the realm list a bunch of servers jumped back up a level… even the CCC French Rp cluster is medium now despite that listing as low for a while. The realm list behaves in funky ways sometimes.

@Jånek: Somebody did something alright. WRP figures shot up like a Christmas tree. Draenor went up almost 40 000 and I am not seeing a single sub 3 000 figure realm anymore. Just before I hit refresh there were lots. We need more info. :smiley: One thing is certain. The number of active players did not go up by half a million or more in just a couple of days.

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but thats interesting how does Warcraft Realm Population even get its data, the numbers on that site are all over the place all the time.

The website just says
“- All data is gathered from Battle.net API usign guilds and characters info.”

Im curious what API’s they use to get that data, also curious that it shows EU having fewer characters but more guilds than US but US has overall smaller populations, something doesn’t feel right. I also don’t see this affecting other regions, the US realm list looks very much unchanged from the last few days, I don’t follow the reading super closely but I would notice a few key realms switching.

Warcraft Realms website gets it’s data from an addon. Players download and install the addon like any other WoW addon, and it runs whilst you’re playing WoW. It takes a “census” of whoever is online, on the realm/joint realm you’re playing on, on that faction. The player then uploads that data to the Warcraft Realms site.

The reason the data is all over the place is twofold. Firstly it relies on people having the addon, running the addon, and uploading the data, per realm, per faction. Secondly, since Blizzard changed the way addons work using the /who commands, it can no longer be used passively. ie, it used to automatically do a full /who of everyone online, without any user help (they still had to be logged in to a specific realm and faction, of course). Blizzard stopped that, primarily, I believe, to try and stop some of the guild recruitment spammers (they had certainly been aware of the census addon for a considerable number of years and were fine with it). So now the addon runs only when a user is actively interacting with the game. Meaning they can’t simply log in to a realm and let it do its data collection by itself, it’s a lot more user intensive, and takes a lot more time.

So … data on the site will have jumped for a couple of reasons … either more people are online on a specific realm, at the time the census was taking place, or (potentially more likely), as realm connections are in the process of taking place, more people are checking out realms theirs may potentially be connected with, meaning there is more data available.

I certainly know that I’ve taken a few more data runs on different realms recently.

For example … I’m currently playing on Lightbringer/Mazrigos on Horde side. My census has just popped up to say that, on the most recent census run it:

“Found 2 new characters, and saw 55. Took 14 min 52 sec.”

Admittedly that was longer than normal, because i was multitasking and not playing constantly … the census basically does what you can do … a /who … but it breaks it down … /who 120. If that brings a result of 49 (which is the max /who will report), it breaks it down further into class, or race, and then alphabetically by name. So realms with more people on, take longer, and also become slightly less accurate, because in theory a level 120 could be included in the census and, if they’re alt hopping, could then be included in several other results for the same census. In theory it’s “concurrent players”, but depending on how long it takes, it might not be.

But then, none of the ways we have to see population are accurate … this I feel, if you have an active census-taker on your realm, is the most accurate.

**EDIT - and I’ve just realised you’re talking about wowrealmpopulation website, NOT warcraft realms website :stuck_out_tongue: So ignore the above :stuck_out_tongue:

@Jånek: Unfortunately I did not screen shot the previous version… but I took a shot from yesterday before refreshing, that data here:

EU characters in database: 4 779 518 of which 2 244 082 is currently considered being active within 2 week period.
EU guilds in database: 26 494 that have at least 10 members that are considered active within 2 week period.

US characters in database: 6 349 882 of which 1 409 933 is currently considered being active within 2 week period.
US guilds in database: 15 007 that have at least 10 members that are considered active within 2 week period.

Korean characters in database: 677 101 of which 139 199 is currently considered being active within 2 week period.
Korean guilds in database: 2 156 that have at least 5 members that are considered active within 2 week period.

Taiwanese characters in database: 744 075 of which 106 514 is currently considered being active within 2 week period.
Taiwanese guilds in database: 1 586 that have at least 5 members that are considered active within 2 week period.

And today’s numbers here:

EU characters in database: 4 778 490 of which 2 174 856 is currently considered being active within 2 week period.
EU guilds in database: 26 547 that have at least 10 members that are considered active within 2 week period.

US characters in database: 6 312 060 of which 1 401 234 is currently considered being active within 2 week period.
US guilds in database: 14 993 that have at least 10 members that are considered active within 2 week period.

Korean characters in database: 677 101 of which 136 906 is currently considered being active within 2 week period.
Korean guilds in database: 2 143 that have at least 5 members that are considered active within 2 week period.

Taiwanese characters in database: 744 075 of which 105 125 is currently considered being active within 2 week period.
Taiwanese guilds in database: 1 579 that have at least 5 members that are considered active within 2 week period.

But as far as I can recall, every single region went up, a LOT. Or more precisely, the numbers on WRP went up. To be honest, I am more inclined to think that some error(s) were corrected and the numbers now correspond better with reality. You may recall me remarking about the strange drops a while back that I did not understand.

Those very latest day to day changes, however, are indeed small.

But these numbers dont make much sense is what im saying, also there is no way that Korean servers have fewer players than Taiwanese servers, Taiwan is easily the smallest region in wow.

It would be cool to know what they are pulling their numbers from.

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@Jånek: You have to keep in mind that they are tracking characters, not players. And Taiwan has less currently active characters, which fits your idea of slightly smaller player base. Those regions probably do not adhere exactly to EU or US behaviour, but the difference of about 30 000 active characters can represent almost 10 000 people. On small regions that is a significant difference, I would say.