According to various WoW fan sites: any other game that shows high server population, has a realm capacity of 2000 and those games are trying to fool you.  On the other hand, If Warcraft has a high population, its realm capacity is set at 50,000.

But how many do you think would be on at any one time? I can't imagine there being 10,000 online all at once on a realm like Bleeding Hollow or Emerald Dream. I think high pop would mean 5000-7000 online and full would be around 10,000. 

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/status  look at the realm list, there is 1 full realm right now. Lets Assume this, the average number online for each realm at the moment.

High: 6000

Medium: 3500

Low: 1000

That would mean right now current people online are as follows.

High Pop Realms: 220,000

Medium Pop Realms: 542,000

Low Pop Realms: 54,000

That would mean there are 816,000 people online right now. That is less then the number of people online 24/7 on steam which ranges from 2-4 million but still very impressive for one game. This also sounds right for a game that has 10 million subscribers, almost 10% of its user base is online right now.

But do you guys think 6000 is about right for a high population realm? 

Have any of you people ever use the social panel > who >Type in level ( 18 or 18-21 ).  You can learn a lot from this, yet very few use it.  From here you can type in levels, classes, guilds.  With this you can also find groups to do dungeons and raids.  At times I even use it to ask simple class questions by asking a higher level Warlock.  I've even went as far as making a temporary level 1 character just to check on populations.  Low populations at all levels ?...Delete character, and try another realm !

With using the " Who " I found that I really don't even need a guild because I could get the class and level to do anything.  I'm playing Vanilla WoW right now, so I don't have a Dungeon finder.

Here is a cool little story from just yesterday :

With my level 19 Warlock I was looking to do Deadmines.  In zone chat someone kept spamming LFM Deadmines over and over.  I sent a message " Ill go 19 Warlock here " .....In response I got a rude tell back that I'm not a tank.  Believe me the person was rude.  So using the Social panel > Who I found all six Warriors online at my level and had a tank in less than two minutes....What did I do ?...I invited everyone from the rude persons group but him and we did Deadmines.

It's amazing what you can do with the Social panel in every mmo.  However I guess none of it matters to players with cross realm LFD.

Originally posted by delete5230

Have any of you people ever use the social panel > who >Type in level ( 18 or 18-21 ).  You can learn a lot from this, yet very few use it.  From here you can type in levels, classes, guilds.  With this you can also find groups to do dungeons and raids.  At times I even use it to ask simple class questions by asking a higher level Warlock.  I've even went as far as making a temporary level 1 character just to check on populations.  Low populations at all levels ?...Delete character, and try another realm !

With using the " Who " I found that I really don't even need a guild because I could get the class and level to do anything.  I'm playing Vanilla WoW right now, so I don't have a Dungeon finder.

 

Here is a cool little story from just yesterday :

With my level 19 Warlock I was looking to do Deadmines.  In zone chat someone kept spamming LFM Deadmines over and over.  I sent a message " Ill go 19 Warlock here " .....In response I got a rude tell back that I'm not a tank.  Believe me the person was rude.  So using the Social panel > Who I found all six Warriors online at my level and had a tank in less than two minutes....What did I do ?...I invited everyone from the rude persons group but him and we did Deadmines.

 

It's amazing what you can do with the Social panel in every mmo.  However I guess none of it matters to players with cross realm LFD.

While I do not doubt the usefulness of the social panel as you so nicely mentioned, it is useless to determine the population of a server as it is capped to show only 49 people at once.

As this thread is about how many people online concurrently play on a server labelled "High", the social panel is unfortunately not good for this kind of measurement.

There are a few web sites dedicated to find WoW realm population, just google that and you will find some, but of course they are not 100% accurate as they gather info only of the players with the add on enabled, which is surely not 100% of the population, but it might give you an idea of the general ballpark of characters existing on that server.

Yes Robo is correct! If I go back to WoW I will be sure to join THE BEST pvp realm, Bleeding Hollow or Emerald Dream, both high pop relams with almost even number of Horde and Alliance on them. I will be a legend and I will become the king of stormwind, I will hack the servers and carve my Alliance domain , my own city called poop isle , It will be a huge brown castle with all my npc draeni guards and i will have my thrown room and ladies, it will have stores and rest areas, 5 taverns and quests. 

I AM THE BEST.

Originally posted by Volkmar

Originally posted by delete5230

Have any of you people ever use the social panel > who >Type in level ( 18 or 18-21 ).  You can learn a lot from this, yet very few use it.  From here you can type in levels, classes, guilds.  With this you can also find groups to do dungeons and raids.  At times I even use it to ask simple class questions by asking a higher level Warlock.  I've even went as far as making a temporary level 1 character just to check on populations.  Low populations at all levels ?...Delete character, and try another realm !

With using the " Who " I found that I really don't even need a guild because I could get the class and level to do anything.  I'm playing Vanilla WoW right now, so I don't have a Dungeon finder.

 

Here is a cool little story from just yesterday :

With my level 19 Warlock I was looking to do Deadmines.  In zone chat someone kept spamming LFM Deadmines over and over.  I sent a message " Ill go 19 Warlock here " .....In response I got a rude tell back that I'm not a tank.  Believe me the person was rude.  So using the Social panel > Who I found all six Warriors online at my level and had a tank in less than two minutes....What did I do ?...I invited everyone from the rude persons group but him and we did Deadmines.

 

It's amazing what you can do with the Social panel in every mmo.  However I guess none of it matters to players with cross realm LFD.

While I do not doubt the usefulness of the social panel as you so nicely mentioned, it is useless to determine the population of a server as it is capped to show only 49 people at once.

As this thread is about how many people online concurrently play on a server labelled "High", the social panel is unfortunately not good for this kind of measurement.

There are a few web sites dedicated to find WoW realm population, just google that and you will find some, but of course they are not 100% accurate as they gather info only of the players with the add on enabled, which is surely not 100% of the population, but it might give you an idea of the general ballpark of characters existing on that server.

Well Volk,

Are you sure if you type in social panel :

90 Rogue, you will find 49 Rogues ?

90 Warrior, you will find 49 Warriors ?

90 Druid, you will find 49 Druids...And so on ?......I would guess not !

Maybe you would with the retail version of WoW, it's been about a year and a half since I played.  However when I did, I researched for a very high populated PvP server.  At that time it was "Blackrock" not only that but It would say server full....Yet the open world was always empty, Stormwind had an OK crowed and when I typed in each class at max level in Who, it was surprisingly lower than you would expect for each class..........Many would say a populated server would have 20K and so on.  My figures would be more like 1,000 at prime time, and I could only guess maybe 3,000 total.....Here is a little homework for you.  Go into your guild panel and click on all members and see the hundred of inactive classes that have been created and not played in a long time !!!!

Developers are fudging in all mmos more so than you think.

I enjoy doing searches in all my mmos. I've done it on games like EQ2 and Vanguard on there most populated servers, and often even during prime time maybe 800 on EQ2 when people would guess 10K and Vanguard would have 300 when people would guess 2K.......I really really don't think Blizzard is anywhere close to 9 million players.

Their probably even counting me and I have not played retail WoW in a year and a half, AND MY MANY CHARACTERS I'VE CREATED ARE STILL IN SEVERAL GUILD LIST AS UN PLAYED !!! 

Character activity per account of both factions combined counts for serveractivity ratings. Total accounts is so far irrelevant.

CCU aka login's is only relevant for "full" status. Full comes either manually set or automatically hitting the set population cap.

Expectable PCU per status currently on US realms .

(peak concurrent user activity mostly occuring during ~19-22 hours / both factions combined) :

High: 3000 - 3500 curently, but up to 4500~5000 during patches/events/till full state

Medium: 1000  ~ 3000

Low: 0 ~ 1000

(Based on Cencus results of all US Server in the past 30 days. Always in favour of the highest population peak and rounded up to 500s)

"Currently" because High/Medium/Low is periodically readjusted to the latest regional "average". Unless for a sudden fallout, server will never go all medium and low or just low. Foreign regions thus have different ratings (or rather thats anotherpiece of evidence it self for the adjustments, next to noticing the sudden permanent changes of the status without a change of population).

Originally posted by delete5230

Originally posted by Volkmar

Originally posted by delete5230

Have any of you people ever use the social panel > who >Type in level ( 18 or 18-21 ).  You can learn a lot from this, yet very few use it.  From here you can type in levels, classes, guilds.  With this you can also find groups to do dungeons and raids.  At times I even use it to ask simple class questions by asking a higher level Warlock.  I've even went as far as making a temporary level 1 character just to check on populations.  Low populations at all levels ?...Delete character, and try another realm !

With using the " Who " I found that I really don't even need a guild because I could get the class and level to do anything.  I'm playing Vanilla WoW right now, so I don't have a Dungeon finder.

 

Here is a cool little story from just yesterday :

With my level 19 Warlock I was looking to do Deadmines.  In zone chat someone kept spamming LFM Deadmines over and over.  I sent a message " Ill go 19 Warlock here " .....In response I got a rude tell back that I'm not a tank.  Believe me the person was rude.  So using the Social panel > Who I found all six Warriors online at my level and had a tank in less than two minutes....What did I do ?...I invited everyone from the rude persons group but him and we did Deadmines.

 

It's amazing what you can do with the Social panel in every mmo.  However I guess none of it matters to players with cross realm LFD.

While I do not doubt the usefulness of the social panel as you so nicely mentioned, it is useless to determine the population of a server as it is capped to show only 49 people at once.

As this thread is about how many people online concurrently play on a server labelled "High", the social panel is unfortunately not good for this kind of measurement.

There are a few web sites dedicated to find WoW realm population, just google that and you will find some, but of course they are not 100% accurate as they gather info only of the players with the add on enabled, which is surely not 100% of the population, but it might give you an idea of the general ballpark of characters existing on that server.

Well Volk,

Are you sure if you type in social panel :

90 Rogue, you will find 49 Rogues ?

90 Warrior, you will find 49 Warriors ?

90 Druid, you will find 49 Druids...And so on ?......I would guess not !

 

Maybe you would with the retail version of WoW, it's been about a year and a half since I played.  However when I did, I researched for a very high populated PvP server.  At that time it was "Blackrock" not only that but It would say server full....Yet the open world was always empty, Stormwind had an OK crowed and when I typed in each class at max level in Who, it was surprisingly lower than you would expect for each class..........Many would say a populated server would have 20K and so on.  My figures would be more like 1,000 at prime time, and I could only guess maybe 3,000 total.....Here is a little homework for you.  Go into your guild panel and click on all members and see the hundred of inactive classes that have been created and not played in a long time !!!!

Developers are fudging in all mmos more so than you think.

I enjoy doing searches in all my mmos. I've done it on games like EQ2 and Vanguard on there most populated servers, and often even during prime time maybe 800 on EQ2 when people would guess 10K and Vanguard would have 300 when people would guess 2K.......I really really don't think Blizzard is anywhere close to 9 million players.

Their probably even counting me and I have not played retail WoW in a year and a half, AND MY MANY CHARACTERS I'VE CREATED ARE STILL IN SEVERAL GUILD LIST AS UN PLAYED !!! 

No, 49 is the MAXIMUM it displays. Clearly if there are less than 49 it will display those instead. But if you are looking to determine how many people are on a server and you check the level 90s.... it will show you just 49 of them, even if there could be 50, 100, 500 and so on. As such it is not a good tool to find out the current population of a server.

Originally posted by Volkmar

Originally posted by delete5230

Originally posted by Volkmar

While I do not doubt the usefulness of the social panel as you so nicely mentioned, it is useless to determine the population of a server as it is capped to show only 49 people at once.

No, 49 is the MAXIMUM it displays. Clearly if there are less than 49 it will display those instead. But if you are looking to determine how many people are on a server and you check the level 90s.... it will show you just 49 of them, even if there could be 50, 100, 500 and so on. As such it is not a good tool to find out the current population of a server.

Young one, you shouldn't try to teach anyone, when you dont have the slightest clue about the matter yourself.

Cencus (the warcfractrealms.com addon) is using a complex (not complicated just complex) algrorithm to parse player log-in's using dozens of combinations of search queries ran trough the /who list query field. Rerunning everytime with more specific queries when the 49 limit was reached.

The 49 limit becomes irrelevant if your queries are potentially so specific, they can't even come close to the limit and many dont even return any results at all, aka zero hits.

How many many level 39 undead mages with a "Ab" in their name will you find running arround in the region Stranglethorn? You will be lucky two find even just 2.

You should think over, when someone who played the game years ago for just several weeks, must explain to you 8 year old basic functions of the games UI your are trying to defend.

Originally posted by Sukiyaki

Character activity per account of both factions combined counts for serveractivity ratings. Total accounts is so far irrelevant.

CCU aka login's is only relevant for "full" status. Full comes either manually set or automatically hitting the set population cap.

 

Expectable PCU per status currently on US realms .

(peak concurrent user activity mostly occuring during ~19-22 hours / both factions combined) :

High: 3000 - 3500 curently, but up to 4500~5000 during patches/events/till full state

Medium: 1000  ~ 3000

Low: 0 ~ 1000

(Based on Cencus results of all US Server in the past 30 days. Always in favour of the highest population peak and rounded up to 500s)

"Currently" because High/Medium/Low is periodically readjusted to the latest regional "average". Unless for a sudden fallout, server will never go all medium and low or just low. Foreign regions thus have different ratings (or rather thats anotherpiece of evidence it self for the adjustments, next to noticing the sudden permanent changes of the status without a change of population).

Are you sure WoW cenus is correct? 3000-3500 seems a little low for a High server population. It should be.

High- 4000-5000

Medium 1000-4000

Low 0-1000

3000-3500 is very low! As expansions come the world gets bigger and it spreads more people out. So how many of that 3500 would be in a Raid/Battlegrounds/Waiting ? Probably 1500, how many would be AFK? 500 at least. This leaves for only 1500 to be around in the world.