Quick post that perhaps some will find useful. Last night (Friday 22nd Nov) I collected population data for both factions on the four EU PVP transfer servers between 7.30pm and 8.30pm. The results were:
Flamelash: 1124 Alliance, unknown Horde players (my former server)
At ~9pm server time I switched over to Bloodfang from Flamelash based on the data above and grabbed some extra data on the population of Bloodfang vs Flamelash:
Obviously this just shows the populations of those servers at a particular point in time, not total players or peak players on those servers etc. But I moved to Bloodfang based on the faction balance estimate and it’s been a hell of a lot nicer than being on Flamelash so far.
Thanks for the extra info, that’s good to know. Unfortunately I don’t have the corresponding figures for the Alliance as I completely cleared my census each time I did this to make sure I only got the players online at that particular time, and I’ve only been using the add-on a couple of days.
From the Alliance perspective it certainly felt like there’s basically twice as many Horde on Flamelash as Alliance, but the numbers I posted may be artificially low because at least some Alliance probably aren’t bothering to play until the BGs arrive. Maybe there’ll be a resurgence when the BGs hit!
I really don’t know how those stats can be true for Earthshaker.
There are literally at least 20, fully geared 60’s walking around in Burning Steppes at 4AM. The Menethil Boat is camped 24/7 and by 24/7 I literally mean 24/7, by at least 3 people.
There was a 20+ raid camping Light’s Hope at 5AM this morning as well. I did a /who Gorge (for the Alliance side) at like 5 in the afternoon today and I saw like 15 level 60s and 3 people between level 47 and 51.
Friend did the same on the Horde side and got 50 level 60’s and there were also 25 who were in Blackrock Mountain.
Now, I know these statistics can never be perfect and only Blizzard has the real data, but the situation is bad here. People who transfer here from Gehenas, Mograine or Zandalar, Shazzrah say that the situation there is like 80%+ Horde atm and this server is close to that. It’s by no way near the same levels of population, but I’m pretty sure that the A:H ratio is like 30-35% to 70-65% at best.
I’ve spoken to a lot of Horde players who say they got nothing else to do on more populated servers because everyone is camping flypaths 24/7 for 5-6 Honor per kill on a level 50 who comes to light up the flypath or return a quest.
Literally all the bullcrap could have been avoided if Blizzard implemented faction caps. They had the full data and they knew perfectly well that Alliance players would unable to play the game for a month or two. It’s only fair if Horde players get AT LEAST 3-4 hour queues on AV and about 1.5 hours on WSG.
When you log in as a casual or a hardcore player, you go in to play the game. It’s not your fault that the server you and your friends decided to roll on has 70-80% Horde pop.
Maybe, you wanna do dungeons, maybe farm some veins, maybe do PvP, maybe even a raid. You literally cannot do anything.
YOU CANNOT PLAY THE GAME YOU PAY TO PLAY<<<
You cannot enjoy a single thing because the other faction has such a large population that you cannot do a single activity that you wish to do. A party or even a raid will not fix the situation because you are so heavily outnumbered, it’s absolutely pointless.
You can be a PvP-hungry beast but you can’t do that. You can catch a strangler or two with your group, but then you simply get curbstomped and camped for hours.
You seem to fail to realize that on servers with large enough populations, you literally cannot res, hearthstone because the graves are camped for 24 hours, literally 24 hours.
It’s actual punishment and Blizzard does not currently allow you an option to opt out of this. Sure, you can go to a lower pop server, but you’ll most likely encounter the same issues if God forbid you’re leveling between 48 and 60.
Don’t get me wrong, the picture would be absolutely the same if the cards were reversed and 9/10 servers had an overwhelming Alliance majority. It would have been the exact same thing.
Nah, the numbers I posted are just the people who were online at ~7.30pm on a single Friday night. The actual number of players on each server active across the last week is likely to be MUCH higher that that. But I think you can get a sense of the relative populations of each server and faction from that snapshot.
I think vanilla servers had like 3k population TOTAL, which means even Earthshaker is substantially larger than a vanilla server. But I’m not completely sure where that 3k figure comes from tbh, it might not be accurate.
I don’t have specific info on the level ranges for each server unfortunately, collecting that data was hard enough already and I didn’t want to slow things down by splitting it out into level ranges because I wanted to make sure I grabbed the data from all the servers at as similar a time as possible.
In general level 60s tend to make up about 35% of each server from the data I’ve collected over the past week, but I imagine many of the non-60s are playing an alt and could switch to a 60 if they wanted, so it’s hard to tell really.
This is what I meant, all of the people at the time of measuring.
I collect data on multiple servers and factions at the same time using Isboxer which allows me to broadcast keybinds and mouseclicks, so I can accurately compare current population, the only limiting factor is the number of WoW accounts
Being horde on flamelash must be a sad experience, literally every flight path, every dungeon is being camped by tons of horde who just hang out in packs and wait for their pray to come by.
Me and 2 friends transferred to Bloodfang from Golemagg yesterday, and we decided to go to BRM just to see the situation - killed few hordes, got killed few times, never had so much fun since the pahse 2 launch.
I created char on Bloodfang earlier just to see the population ont the server and I was worried that there is not many ppl playing, because the cities looked empty in comparsion to Golemagg. But I think it’s because, there is not many options other than staying in the cities on Golemagg.
That’s great to hear, welcome to Bloodfang and I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself - I’ve also found the PVP much better here too. Did what I posted have anything to do with you choice at all?
I think Bloodfang does definitely have a lower server population than a Full server like Golemagg but I’ve certainly not found it a problem. It’s still pretty easy to find groups and raids, and I find it nice that not every farming spot has like 5 people parked on it the whole time. Seems a nice balance to me!
Well, I did looked up some statistics on all servers that were open for transfers, but I was not sure how recent those statistics are. Then I created characters on all those servers and asked players on them. Then I read your post that the 50/50 ratio on bloodfang is more or less correct.
And I think that the amount of ppl on Bloodfang is closer to what was on medium-high populated server in vanilla.
So I like it now, but time will tell more.
