I think the URL was “Realmpop”, not sure. It was great for checking distribution of races and classes across realms. The data was generally presented in a very useful way. Now I only find list-based sites with very little and very rigid data.
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Blizz realized it could track how many active players the game had and broke the whole thing.
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New privacy regulations? (Understand my doubts. Blizzard’s total carelessness with the Armory years ago is still in my mind. And this is not about personal information, but -presumably - anonymous data, so if it’s an issue now, it should have been long ago. And these days we have that “show only character achievements” that is apparently some half-assed. barely useful feature. I stopped bothering to deal with that stuff.)
Not an unreasonable thesis.
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It’s just a guess of course but paired with removing subscriber count from their quarterly and very quickly breaking census plus on classic it seems active players is something they want to keep private.
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Yeah, we know it’s all business and that shareholders tend to be a fickle bunch that are asking for being deceived and lied to.
Seems more like a side-effect of the Auction House revamp they did, which no longer provides the character names, which was what realmpop used to extract as its data source.
Unfortunate, but realmpop’s data was always being wrongly interpreted and used for false conclusions and misguided narratives. So in some way it’s a blessing in disguise. 
And now there’s a website which mainly just presents people with THE “recommended” realms for each faction, by which they mean those with the most extreme faction imbalance and likely login queue times and server stalls. 
I have almost all my chars on two realms with the most even faction balance, and they’re not even PvP realms. Because balance is hooty…I mean healthy.
I fail to see what your point is. Whether other sites provide inaccurate information seems somewhat irrelevant to the fact that realmpop also did.
Regardless, I like the new Auction House, so it’s a loss I can easily live with.
When did Realmpop provide inaccurate information, and in what way was it inaccurate? Above, you say that “realmpop’s data was always being wrongly interpreted”, which is no shock, since pretty much all data gets wrongly interpreted when pulled into public discussion, but you have now laid an accusation of inaccuracy.
On what evidence do you base that accusation?
A side-effect that was not necessary, but an arbitrary decision made in the design of the change.
Together with breaking Census-Plus, as others have said, we can see a clear pattern of decisions.
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ESO and FFXIV are getting game awards left and right while they are flaunting how many active users are playing their games, and they make sure other people can see it!
Meanwhile WoW is falling into irrelevancy as GW2 now in terms of gaming awards because its becoming heavily outdated and losing the market trend for its audience due its internal issues (game quality, monetisation, # of active users, etc.)
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I think it’s because of how it collected data.
If you posted something on AH, it scanned the memberlist of the guild you were in.
No distinction was made between account or character, or whether the character was active or not.
Every character was scanned as it were one player.
But it still gave a decent impression of a realm’s population in my opinion.
I don’t know of a good alternative. There’s Warcraftrealms.com but quite a few realms seem to be needing more data to be somewhat representable.
No.
Realmpop NEVER attempted to assess the number of players, or the amount of activity, on a realm. That misperception is part of what Jito was talking about, with " realmpop’s data was always being wrongly interpreted ".
Realmpop never represented that it measured players, or hours of activity: only characters.
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I really love to bash Blizzard for anything that happened in BFA - but this time i feel like i need to actually defend them.
The way the new AH API works cannot allow you to query the creator of an Auction. At least not for stackable goods, which make up the vast, vast, VAST majority of stuff traded. It could, in theory, provide the data of every single “contributor” to a stacked good auction, but really, realmpop is the ONLY application that actually would have made this data worthwhile to provide.
In the old API it was just a single data field…no problem to expose that. In the new AH it would have required active, additional work to provide this information - and why would the developer who wrote the new API have done this, if it is of absolutely no use to any kind of addon or in-game activity?
I liked Realmpop A LOT. I am sad it is gone. But i do not blame a Blizzard API developer for not doing overtime to provide an additional API just to keep this one website operational.
Edit: Also, raider . io provides the best statistics of player activity, and while their lists are not as easy to use as Realmpop was, Player activity is a much more interesting metric than created characters, imho.
Like I meant; it collected characters, not players.
They even had a disclaimer to emphasize that.
But I assume a lot of people thought it was players given the name of the website and didn’t read any further and just went straight to the pictures. 
I do not. That was an error on my part, trading misinterpretation for inaccuration. Mea culpa.
I just see an AH revamp, not much more related.
I miss realmpop it was really useful. I wish Blizzard would give us relevant statistics on stuff instead.
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Agreed, I wish we had realmpop to see %0.2 played Mechagnomes, now we don’t have that opportunity.
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It was always really interesting to see player population distribution and race choices.
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