Translating...

I think the new players could be due to something called Battle Chest (WoW+BC in one package as low as $20 in some places...

may it be a slight skew from name changes being widely available?

Just curious... we can prune our own records in game, so does this site auto prune characters not played in 30 days?

Character's history are never deleted here. If the char is not seen for 30 days its simply not included in its calculations for the activity of that realm and other stats. The history is still there for you to view, just not included in alot of calculations.


Using Prune on your pc will cause chars to actually be removed from your database.

[quote:31a227ede5="Hybuir"]may it be a slight skew from name changes being widely available?[/quote:31a227ede5]

Shouldn't be as the numbers Rollie is using here is the concurency number, rather than number of newly reported/updated characters in a given time frame.

So for example in a three hour time frame(during prime time) I'm running census on my home server while playing on my main. Someone else playing at that time spends an hour on three different characters playing them sequentially. That person will show up as one person on Rollie's totals shown above, not three.

This would also go for name changes, should it be one person who has a name change take effect an hour into my two hours of play time. He'll show up in the numbers given above as 1 player.

Though He'll show in my submissions for that day(and the realm character count) as two characters when it actually is one. One of them being updated for the last time, the other showing up as a new character entry.

[quote:9977ff0352="Alanthus"]I think the new players could be due to something called Battle Chest (WoW+BC in one package as low as $20 in some places...[/quote:9977ff0352]

I think it is simply a number of people playing more/longer over the holidays. Finals came/went for the college crowd, the pre-(highschool)graduate crowd is out of Christmas break. A number of people in other job fields were likewise on vacation for a substantial portion of the month. We'll see what happens in January/February. I'd expect the activity numbers to drop back down again as school resumes/people go back to work.

This is one of the things to keep in mind when you're looking at (incomplete) realm activity data like WCR provides, rather than subscription activity data which is what Blizzard looks at.

It really could be due to people having gotten WoW for Christmas as well. I wasn't seeing queues like this before Christmas, only after. Who knows =)

My realm was getting queues after patch 2.3 came out, and it hasn't gone away since. Reported queue size hasn't really changed either.

Me thinks its Blizzard's way of distributing the population during the prime time. If someone were to install the game in the evening time and start playing, if they are new and don't have any other friends playing then they will be forced to roll on a lower population realm.

A somewhat good idea...

A 4000 player queue is silly, but it was 3000 pre-BC anyways ;)

Will be interesting to see the numbers for January consider this comment from Drysc:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4032673628&pageNo=5&sid=1#86

[quote:5f1fab7ea2="Drysc"] My signature is so ? propos right now it hurts.

Personally, I would say probably not for a while. At least not at as long as we continue to hit what looks to me like new concurrency records, and probably sometime after one of our largest population concerns ceases to be that many realms just have too many people on them.

Not that I need to justify it, just throwing in my own observations, but many people have limited views and thus incorrect perceptions on the status of player base size. The fact that we haven't opened new realms continues to be, I would guess, the main contributor.

If you've been around long enough you'll remember the large hardware upgrades we did about half a year before Burning Crusade when realms were down for something like four or so days. Those upgrades allowed and continue to allow us to pump up the population caps on the realms, something we couldn't really do before. So while populations rise we sort of give some head room as we go. Of course eventually, ie now, we start to see the end of the tunnel (the landmasses can only support so much) and open free transfers as needed. There are of course also realms which would be considered low population in comparison, but aside from literally a handful of realms (I could count them on one hand), every other realm has a population that would have been considered high to overpopulated before the launch of Burning Crusade.[/quote:5f1fab7ea2]