I played WAR open beta and loved it, Im currently playing lotro and am now looking for a new mmo and well I guess ill give WAR a shot, but before i buy it can some one tell me how the populations is, is there a lot of  players playing?

I play in European servers. After the merges the servers are healthier than ever. There are only a few of servers now but you will find alot of ppl in every tier. Mythic/Goa did a great job allowing transfers early (not like AoC).

Since the Call to Arms "expansion" a lot of people been resuscribing to WAR, plus the server merges makes some pretty decent populations in every tiers. Been playing some open RvR today during the day with a half full warband in tier one.. something I haven't been doing in quite some time... Since launch in fact. (most of the slayers and choppas are now T2 and T3).

As for the quality of the population, I'm still having a great fun with the pick up groups I'm getting. WAR propably have one of the most mature community out there. You should definitly give it a shot... There's a free trial available now, might want to start with that.

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Originally posted by dcsurfer731
I played WAR open beta and loved it, Im currently playing lotro and am now looking for a new mmo and well I guess ill give WAR a shot, but before i buy it can some one tell me how the populations is, is there a lot of  players playing?
 

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You can give the trial a shot.. 10 days and you can judge for yourself. Easy to find the links.

reactivated today after i havent played since January. and well. BETTER THEN EVER! i started 1 week after release untill January. playing Casualy. in that whole time i got only a lvl 23 Witch Hunter and a lvl 12 Witch Elf... i was on Magnus and Volkmare server and it was almost like a solo game the entier time.... Now its active. i went to a PQ and man it was 12+ of us in a lvl 2-3 P!... it a was awesome... started a new Chapa... all i can say is. MMO's usualy last me 1-2 months not even that, i played wow for 2 weeks and quit. CoH/CoV was my longest at 9 months. and i am 100% posaite this is my MMO of choice. its fun, the RvR is awesome, its easy and the comunity is more mature then most other MMO's

Its good to hear that the population is thriving on servers ill definitly go try out the 10 free days thing

Just make sure you pick the most populated trial server. And go for Vortex (best server in any mmorpg I have heard) if you subscribe.

Fact is as it stands right now, no one can honestly reccomend a long term server choice.  Two of the biggest servers of the past, Skull throne  and volkmar, are losing people left and right and have seriously gone down hill.

Mythic has no real control on thing like faction balance.  The health of a server is completely random and in the hands of forces beyond their control. 

Pick a seemingly populace server and cross your fingers but expect to re-roll or transfer eventually.  Maybe the community will get together somehow and eventually fix the shifting populations and factional balance.  Mythic has done a piss poor and farnkly non-existant job at it. 

I have almost never seen an MMO server as dominant in population as Volkmar and especially Skull Throne shift in population so radically.  And this is not from the game itself losing players.  People just shifted around.  Well partially its from the game losing players and guilds in that the faction balance altered over time. 

Plus the enjoyability of a server is heavily determine by population.  Its really quite the mess.  Seriously don't stick around on a server that seems to be low.  Even if it used to be high.  You may want to consider cultivating alts on multiple servers.

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Originally posted by gestalt11

Mythic has no real control on thing like faction balance.  The health of a server is completely random and in the hands of forces beyond their control. 

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I agree with this to a point. While it's extremely hard for Mythic to control the overall balance to a complete degree, they have had (and still do) plenty of opportunities to fix the balance. Just thinking of two things right off could help to fix that.

1) First, stop nerfing, then buffing, then nerfing, then buffing. While some of this is necessary, they do it to an absurd amount and have proven with DAoC that they do this until the guesses seem right. This should mostly have all been worked out in beta, with just one or two classes needing tweaks. Instead, they have a few classes OP and weak, they reverse those, then half the people start rerolling alts because their toon is now too weak. (WEs) So then those guys quit playing WEs and reroll on the side that got the buff (Order). That screws not just one server, but TWO servers- the one where the WE left, and the one where the WH was added. Dumb.. really monumentally dumb. Then in a few weeks, they'll nerf another class because to rebuff the WE admits a mistake was made in the amount of nerfage. There is no reason that they pump up Slayer and Choppa damage to nutty levels where they run through things in the first two tiers, then by T4 they start getting owned. Why would someone want to get used to a very strong class early, only to later be an okay class? (KotBS, anyone?)

2) Second, they should have limited exactly what faction could have gone to what server when they shut down those 63 servers. In their wisdom, they gave the customer pretty much total choice allowing either faction to land on any server they wanted. This was on top of the WE nerf. They seemed to have no idea how many Order would end up tipping a balance on one server, or vice versa with Destro. It was completely like a card trick. Throw the deck up in the air, and hope to snatch out the card the mark says was his card. Again, this was pretty stupid. They should have had limits (just like they put limits on how many people can enter a city siege) where only X amount of Order were allowed to go to a place, then no more Order. They allowed this later, but this should have been enforced with a draconian flavor, not listening to "But my one buddy is on that one, I want to play with him!"

Most of the problem with Warhammer has had little to do with the game itself overall. It was the decisions by the leaders that put developers in bad spots since inception. Just two factions instead of several. The marketing of Destro heavily before launch and the sheer OP'ed Witch Elves allowed to run crazy with much weaker mirror Witch Hunters. Allowing developers to put all the crowd control in the game. A few more, but what's the point in listing them all over again?

For a game that relies exclusively on population amounts and balances, they seem to have little clue that was the case, almost like it was their first time making this type of game, which it wasn't.

To be clear I am not saying they couldn't control stuff simply that they have no control.

In many cases they have abdicated control.  They could have used server transfers to enforce server balance.  They didn't and servers like Monolith became wildly lopsided after the first set of server transfers because of it.

On Monolith there's been pretty good oRVR action. Can't say what it's like on other servers.

I can say there have been improvements to the game since the open beta. You might want to try the free trial and see how you like the game post-Patch 1.2.

Originally posted by dcsurfer731

I played WAR open beta and loved it, Im currently playing lotro and am now looking for a new mmo and well I guess ill give WAR a shot, but before i buy it can some one tell me how the populations is, is there a lot of  players playing?

 

Pheonix throne is going good.

I can attest to Monolith going strong as well.

Originally posted by goldenr1

I can attest to Monolith going strong as well.

Yes Monolith is strong now.  But after the first round of transfers it was completely lopsided towards destruction.  Which is why I mentioned that one.  Alot of these servers are careening about wildly.  Perhaps only Phoenix Throne being steadily decent.

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by goldenr1

I can attest to Monolith going strong as well.

 

Yes Monolith is strong now.  But after the first round of transfers it was completely lopsided towards destruction.  Which is why I mentioned that one.  Alot of these servers are careening about wildly.  Perhaps only Phoenix Throne being steadily decent.

 

 

Is Monolith more strong on the Destruction or Order side ?

I went back for the 10 day return promotion and I gotta say Ostermark (I'm fairly sure that was it) was pretty bare. I saw people running around, but in the 10 days (4 or 5 I played) I only got in ONE scenario battle in tier 1 once I created a new Knight of the Blazing sun. Otherwise I saw next to no enemy factions running around and the chats were pretty empty. Talked to two or three really cool people though.

Can anyone verify that its just that server that was empty, or maybe I caught it at an off time? I've been thinking of trying Warhammer again after playing Dawn of War on PC and falling in love with the mythology again. But population is a big factor for me. An empty MMO seems like a pretty bad time.

Originally posted by TuxedoSLY

I went back for the 10 day return promotion and I gotta say Ostermark (I'm fairly sure that was it) was pretty bare. I saw people running around, but in the 10 days (4 or 5 I played) I only got in ONE scenario battle in tier 1 once I created a new Knight of the Blazing sun. Otherwise I saw next to no enemy factions running around and the chats were pretty empty. Talked to two or three really cool people though.

 

Can anyone verify that its just that server that was empty, or maybe I caught it at an off time? I've been thinking of trying Warhammer again after playing Dawn of War on PC and falling in love with the mythology again. But population is a big factor for me. An empty MMO seems like a pretty bad time.

Ostermark , is the lowist populated server , Try Phenoix Throne , T1 -T4 is busy everynight . I also restarted with a KOTBS , I really like this class ,

Originally posted by BenGellor

Originally posted by TuxedoSLY

I went back for the 10 day return promotion and I gotta say Ostermark (I'm fairly sure that was it) was pretty bare. I saw people running around, but in the 10 days (4 or 5 I played) I only got in ONE scenario battle in tier 1 once I created a new Knight of the Blazing sun. Otherwise I saw next to no enemy factions running around and the chats were pretty empty. Talked to two or three really cool people though.

 

Can anyone verify that its just that server that was empty, or maybe I caught it at an off time? I've been thinking of trying Warhammer again after playing Dawn of War on PC and falling in love with the mythology again. But population is a big factor for me. An empty MMO seems like a pretty bad time.

 

Ostermark , is the lowist populated server , Try Phenoix Throne , T1 -T4 is busy everynight . I also restarted with a KOTBS , I really like this class ,

Phoenix throne has been of the only servers to be consistently close to factionally balanced and also maintain a consistent population size.

I believe this is owes alot to the fact that it is an RP server and many of the "big-time" RP guilds made sure the server started well.

Once again I encourage anyone with even a cursory interest in WAR to throw out all their previous assumptions about population based upon previous MMOs.  Both low population and high population means very different things in the context of WAR.

Usually a high population server stays high pop.  This is clearly not true of WAR.  In fact although Phoenix Throne has always had a fairly high pop it was be no means the highest pop server.  Yet it is now still fairly factionally balanced and also one of the healthiest servers.  Praag is in some ways similar but for completely different reasons.  Mainly because the ORvR people concentrated there and have no where else to go if that is their things.  And to some extent the nature of ORvR may encourage some sort of stick togetherness or something.

I have seen this trend in for RP servers in other games (such as Lnadroval in LOTRO) this is the only trend that seems to have any real consistency in WAR.

You could say server community is far more important in WAR than server size.  However even that statement is not so accurate as some servers had a pretty good core community at times.   So it is also the character of the community as well as the quality and quantity.

A dead server in WAR can mean almost nothing.  And even two medium pop servers can wind up being quite different.

 "A dead server in WAR can mean almost nothing.  And even two medium pop servers can wind up being quite different."

While I can agree with the 2nd part the 1st part is very untrue,WAR is about PQ's and RvR and ofc scenario's,while you have said in your post it may change in time,If any new player or returning player wants to have any sort of fun in the game and not be waiting a lifetime on a scenario to pop,miss out on all the PQ's and indeed wondering why all those keeps are in the game and no-one tries to take them,then they best get a good population server as a dead server is excatly that....a dead server.

     Server population is critical in WAR......Everything about the game that makes it go relies on having alot of players on both sides and in all tiers.......I think Iron Rock is the most populated of the servers I play and it even reaches full status once in awhile........

The populations are crazy right now I checked the server lists about two hours ago and not one server had less then medium pop.

On my server I've been running TIer 3 Keeps all day! SC's have been poping and PQs  have had no less then 5 people doing them.

It's been crazy today and I'm enjoying myself.

I also have a shaman in Tier 1 and SCs pop 24/7 for him and a Sorc in Tier 2 that perma runs ORvR and PQs with my guild.

Pop is just as good as any other mmo imo.

I think everyone on this site needs to stop the obsession with population numbers, it really has no meaning.

Originally posted by happyclappy

I think everyone on this site needs to stop the obsession with population numbers, it really has no meaning.

I agree, people here are a bit obssesed with population.

However, I'm playing in europe and I feel the server mergings have greatly added to RvR, especially to ORvR. There's always battles going on and keep's under siege !

Population is why i left the game.  When they merge half the servers together i might come back, until then, nope.   I remember how beta was a blast to play.  At launch within days, it was difficult to do some low level PQ, that's how bad it was.

Originally posted by happyclappy

I think everyone on this site needs to stop the obsession with population numbers, it really has no meaning.

Except when you happen to have been forced to relocate 2 or 3 times already due to your server dieing/merging :)