WoWhead offera addon for counting classic players. Eu+Us is alredy above 4.5M players.
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Nah, Those are expected numbers. It was expected that there would be drop off of almost 80%. If we assume that initially there were 1.2m players thats around 250, maybe 300k remaining. 400k sticking around after lvl 40 is unexpected.
Those are characters , not players. There are 4.5m created characters. Most are between lvls 5 and 15. Above 40 there is slightly under 400k while max lvl there are only 31k.
These “facts” don’t really mean much tbh.
If you want something relatable you should compare sources like realmpop with the data WoWhead came up with for classic
Current Player Data
While the information present right now isn’t very representative, it already shows impressive numbers. Between US and EU Realms, there have been already over 4 million characters scanned in Classic realms.
I dunno about you but i made sereval characters and have recently played 3 of them. This data may as well be incomplete but with parameters like “2 characters scanned per account” and “25% of the accounts were never scanned for one reason or another” we would end up with 2.5M subs.
BFA sub number at its lowest point was estimated around 2M subs and 8.2 was a real improvement ever since so i’m pretty sure we had a higher sub count after 8.2 release than we currently have subs on classic.
Hard to tell what is happening right now in bfa tho as a part of its players are currently playing classic.
Trelw, did you notice this data point? I thought you might be interested.
I think you’re looking to bait an argument and that this post is not asking a question but inflammatory.
Work it out for yourself for the love of all things holy
Comedy gold, you should get your own Netflix special.
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So about your discussion about realm population, it was quite interesting to read, funny that people immediately said: “I call BS on argent dawn having less than 1000 online at any point”, so I didn’t do recent checks, however even in the past (mop) I observed a big variance in activity obviously depending on time of the day, at the time stormscale was the highest realm for horde, I could find 560 people on in the middle of night, draenor only 300, however stormscale was a pvp realm, draenor pve, so people did pvp even overnight, unlike raids, and if you checked during the day, draenor reached a higher peak, around 4k back then.
So what I’m saying is: currently, wow population (at least retail) is at the lowest it’s been for years (give or take), so argent dawn absolutely will go by far under 1k overnight, the question is the peak, based on what trewl said about silvermoon we can expect a few thousands peak on argent, probably 3k or a little more, usually RP realms hit their peak on saturday and I’ve seen AD overtake the highest non-rp realms on saturday evening.
Not believing chamber of aspects could have 250 players total, about half per faction, is silly: even if you don’t necessarily check in the middle of night, it’s enough you don’t check at peak time and you WILL get a few hundreds only on most medium-low realms, in fact in minority factions, like a german realm named die silberne hand horde, as it’s mainly ally, I used to regularly find less than 50 people online (so doable in a single /who) past midnight already and then as the night continues going down under 10 people, and alliance wasn’t that high either, those realms are low on both, generally with a faction having double or triple the other faction.
This check on that german realm was in bfa a few months ago, it’s gotta be around march or april, but long before classic launched, so it could be even lower now!
I’m impressed by the numbers you reported btw for classic, with realms having 8k people online, it’s true there’s few servers but you’d need at least 2 of the biggest retail realms to make up for that and there’s very few: draenor, silvermoon, twisting, ragnaros, kazzak, tarren, argent, then the others are probably a bit lower with declining realms that were full in the past like stormscale, and some that weren’t always that full, like sylvanas, and then the highest of other languages, like blackrock, blackmoore, eredar, frostwolf, aegwynn, antonidas, hyjal, archimonde, ysondre, that’s gotta take a big part of the retail population, because when you get to the empty realms you’re gonna need like 20 of them to make up a single classic realm!
@Elaynne: Your two posts have a bit of internal conflict. Almost 400 000 at 40+ does not provide evidence that 400 000 people made it to 40+. In fact, the extreme dropoff to maximum level suggests the exact opposite. Also, the precreation process and the queue problems created a situation, where quite a few people have more than three characters at level 5+. I can not play as much as I would like to as I need to focus on school. Even so, I have already pushed 9 characters to or above level 5 and that count will likely at least double within a week.
@Gráinne: I did and it was very interesting, but after very carefully examining data between US and EU, I have to note that the speaker is either misinformed, saying something he actually does not mean or outright lying. Due to time zones and other things, retail WoW has points where probable US+EU concurrency drops below 100 000. If less than 100 000 constituted around 30% of global… I do not think around 330 000 concurrent (with China included) as a daily low would get a game to 1., 2. or 3. on Steam?
@Megapixel: I am still crunching numbers and I am not yet convinced your opening is entirely correct. Some parts of it, however, I can and will confirm. Argent Dawn does drop below 1 000 during night time. In fact, the very limited available data suggests it may actually drop below 300 between roughly 2 and 6 during the morning. As a prime time peak, it reaches 4 000… WCR stats currently say about 2 875 alliance and 1 159 horde. As CP is not instant and does not cover levels 1 to 19, those figures are not quite as exact as they look, but range is correct. Draenor maxes out at over 4 800, but that is likely Wednesday evening data for the most part at least.
WCR does not have current stats for CoA 
, but using data from WRP and other sources suggests the number exceeds 850 players (and over 3 300 active characters) as minimum. Concurrent values will naturally be a lot lower.
Given the sad state of certain BfA realms, a factor of 20 is not even enough. It is, however, worth noting that Classic realms also have an insanely huge gaps between lowest and highest populations ( / activity levels).
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I just looked. Right now, which I’m guessing would be close to lowest for US + EU, the #3 on Steam is 348,525 for CounterStrike Global Offensive, so we’re in the ballpark. #4 is way down, at ~95K. And ofc, if China accounts for a larger percentage, the more active time zone in China now would account for more than 70% at this hour.
@Gráinne: Thank you for that! I will run some additional numbers based on that and see what comes up… 
@Megapixel: I finished my latest set of number crunching. Because the calculations are complicated, I do not do them very often. Comparing the results from data from yesterday vs two earlier data sets the results look like this:
US alliance is almost entirely unchanged compared to the year low (the difference is so small it falls well within the margin of error).
US horde has taken an ultra heavy hit and may be as much as 152 000 in the minus compared to the year high.
EU alliance is up about 60 000 compared to the year low, but nowhere near the year high.
EU horde is is up about 72 000 compared to the year low and almost tied with the year high.
Even more interestingly, the prime time peaks of all four are (far) above the year lows, which makes interpreting what is happening even harder. I am going to have to see, whether I can find a few more a bit older data sets for additional comparisons as they may change what I stated above (even radically).
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@Brewny: If it is extremely low, yes. Once it reaches a certain treshold, it becomes slightly less critical. For BfA realms that breakpoint is around 750 people on each side. For Classic ones somewhat higher due to certain QoL things not existing.
I guess you are not aware that pre-connection Sporeggar (if my recollection is correct) had a total remaining population of 8088 characters (not players) both factions combined? Shockingly small realms sadly are not a new feature.
Obviously, all numbers I’m talking about are the players online at a given time, and it’s not me who did that census recently but it’s totally believable for me that there could be just 250 people on at chamber at an off peak time.
Btw, I’m a bit surprised about quel’thalas, I know it’s been new players for a while (it’s my main realm) but used to have become pretty low before that, I know lately it’s been marked as relatively high population, and I found now at 2 a.m. on a monday 147 people on horde, so it’s gotta be like 300 on ally unless it died out, it’s always been ally dominated, is it supposed to be this high in the middle of night?
there was only 350 online this afternoon on Nagrand/Kilrogg/Runetotem
Less than 100 at midnight, just 50 right now.
Oh, that’s an interesting evolution for the realms: kilrogg group used to be higher than quel’thalas group, ever since realms got connected in mop, it used to be something inbetween high pops like draenor and low pops, now I see quel’thalas overtook it, if I recall alliance is the dominant faction on that realm too, so 350 in the afternoon and perhaps 100-200 on horde is very little, it barely beats qt at 2 a.m.
Exactly, it needs merging to some other servers, because even pushing new players towards it cannot fix it.
There are more guilds on the server overall, than there are players online at peak times.
Yes, I just disagreed with another poster on a thread about a single megaserver cause that would kill the point of having gold on many realms, which I worked really hard towards, however considering originally we had 200-250 servers and now roughly 120 since they got connected, they’re still too many, I can’t cover them all with 2 accounts, I think most servers could use some more 2-way connections and get the number down to 70-80 or so (high pops won’t need them ofc), there’s a lot in the situation of kilrogg or even worse.
well even though K/N/R is so dead, they are not pushing new players towards it anyway… they are seemingly not doing anything about it at all.
Not sure if they are expecting guilds to disband and players to pay for transfers or what.
If they think the new recruit a friend system will do anything, well, why would anyone invite their friends to play on a dead server?
@Megapixel: Message distortion on the way… The impression from the replies suggested you meant just 250 players TOTAL… sub 250 off peak is entirely possible… The lowest off peak I know of is… FOUR both sides combined.
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