Slashdot Mirror

• There are already free services that do refreshing and time-tracking.
• There are plenty of scripts available that already do that.
• Writing a LUA script is extremely simple

Due to the current suites of tools available, the cost-benefit is extremely low. This change increases the accuracy of the results and decreases the work necessary for existing sites to perform. They're already performing, mind you ... it's just less load on theirs and Blizzard's servers now.

I would wager that the largest impact this change has is:

• How these third-party sites gain their data, and
• The cost of entry for new third-party sites

From the user's point of view, things will likely remain relatively constant.

• There are already free services that do refreshing and time-tracking.
• There are plenty of scripts available that already do that.
• Writing a LUA script is extremely simple

Due to the current suites of tools available, the cost-benefit is extremely low. This change increases the accuracy of the results and decreases the work necessary for existing sites to perform. They're already performing, mind you ... it's just less load on theirs and Blizzard's servers now.

I would wager that the largest impact this change has is:

• How these third-party sites gain their data, and
• The cost of entry for new third-party sites

From the user's point of view, things will likely remain relatively constant.

Using the Warcraftrealms census on level 10-80 characters on US and EU realms:

PVE server population = 3.16 million
PVP server population = 2.21 million

PVE-RP server population = 709k
PVP-RP server population = 256k

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

It's a pretty safe bet that the figure is in the millions USD, but beyond that it's hard to say.

While my sample size is very small, 3 out of the 4 people I know IRL who play WoW have each dropped $200 on such services. If we assume that 1% of the WoW population spends half that, and that each 8 characters represent 1 account, that gives us $772k by itself. And that's just a very conservative estimate for one game, since some self-reported figures are much higher. If we expand our assumptions to say that each 4 characters represents 1 account, and that 15% of those accounts have purchased $100 worth of gold or other services, we end up around $23M -- a number which I still suspect is conservative.

More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.

And how many of those players play on one same shard? The massive part matters only if I can actually interact with those other players and the biggest US realms have about 35k characters of levels 10+ rolled on it. That's characters only, mind you.
I don't have any numbers on it, but if you could count only actual accounts/players (and/or players logged in at the same time), those numbers would be way less than that, too.

Anyway, if you're gonna go with this argument, EvE Online beats the whole bunch in that department without breaking a sweat. It's where the massively multiplayer aspect is truly massive with a peak of around 45k accounts (probably a bit less if you discard alt accounts) logged in at the same time in one persistent game universe.

They might have more accounts but I haven't seen any proof they have more active players.

Runescape can apparently handle a total of 320,000 players online at once. (160 servers, 2000 players per server)

Comparatively WoW has 236 servers in the US and 254 in the EU.

With an average of 1000 players per faction online at any one time:
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/activity.php?serverid=-1

That means WoW has on average 490,000 players online in the western world at any one time, that's way more then runescapes max capacity. Stop talking out of your ass.

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/realmstats.php

windrunner has a good amount of people.

now look at dying realms.. jaedenar being an extreme example.

Even better.

There is an addon for WoW called WoW Census which does a /who of online players and reports the information back to their servers afterwards.

You can browse each server and see level densities, race balances, etc.

On top of that, they have a character history function where you can track at what times each character in the system was seen and what level they were.

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/charhistory.php

At that link you can find out just when a person rolled, how fast they leveled, periods of inactivity, a history of guilds they've been in, etc.

We use this tool already when recruiting to see if the recruit has a high turnover in level 70 guilds.

I'm sure something similar could be created to parse the XML data periodically off of wowarmory.com.

Well, in some ways I second this, I'd love to see some new content lower down the levelling ladder, as the old instances and quests can get a little boring after having run through them a lot of times, and they never quite have the same magic redoing them on an alt as they did when you first when in and everything was new and mysterious, but you do need to consider that of the subscribing playerbase, quite a large proportion is at the endgame stage, ok, maybe not Black Temple/Mount Hyjal/etc, but a large proportion are level 70. (Census details)

I'd actually quite like to see some more stuff to do around the karazhan level, for those who aren't really interested in the 25-man stuff, or who can't commit to the time/organisation required. Zul'Aman could be quite good for this, but we shall have to see how it turns out.

Ahh, but if I use thott or the allakhazam or any other data tracker, it's an opt in experience.

And yes it is a slippery slope argument, but slippery slopes do exist.

Maybe I just don't want people to see all my stuff? I don't care if it's harmless information. What stings me is that I don't get a choice. I recognise the terms of use agreeement allows Blizzard to do whatever the heck they want with any data stored in their systems. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and it doesn't mean this kind of behaviour is good customer service.

Unfortunatelly it is not precise nor up to date. In other words it's very inaccurate.

But Blizzard is probably hiding that sort of data on purpose.

You mean like this? http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php

Its a bar graph but its been online for a long ass time. I used it back when I use to play wow.

Blizzard is constantly building a better WoW themselves.

Unfortunately, there are some problems that they will never be able to fix. For example, PvP balance is broken at the higher levels because the population balance is skewed. Across the entire game, there's 3 high-level Alliance players for every 2 high-level Horde (see here). On older servers, it's even worse, 3 Alliance for every 1 Horde (for example my old server, here). Even with the cross-realm battleground queues, Alliance players have to wait longer for games than Horde players. Once the Alliance players get a game though, they tend to win more games than the Horde because a larger population has more opportunities to run endgame content and acquire endgame epics, which in turn leads to a more powerful character.

The only way to truly eradicate that problem would be to do away with one of the core elements of the design, namely the whole concept of Alliance vs. Horde. Obviously that's something that just wouldn't make sense to do, it runs completely contrary to the flavor of the entire Warcraft series. I mean, the first game was called "Orcs and Humans," and not because they were drinking buddies. The only truly permanent way to get rid of this problem is to do away with the idea of player factions on a single server. That's what Fury, an upcoming PvP-centric MMO is doing. From their FAQ:

Are there going to be queues like WoW Battlegrounds?

No. Our realm architecture is very different to WoW and avoids queues or long waits.

In some games (like WoW) you fight within a realm where the total number of opponents is quite limited leading to long wait times. In other games (like Guild Wars) you fight in a single universe where the fights are random and social opportunities are scarce because you can't tell your friends from your enemies.

In Fury you live in a realm of friends and fight against other realms. This increases the number of your opponents and increases the social opportunities. Our matchmaking limits your maximum wait to a few minutes.

To think that WoW has a lock on the one true best design for an MMO is simply foolish. WoW has a pretty good model for 1-59 PvE leveling, but there are many ways to put these games together. I would argue that WoW's endgame is pretty boring, and the PvP model is clearly a half-assed afterthought. As such, I see plenty of potential for a well-designed PvP-centric MMO in the near future. It might be Fury, it might be Warhammer Online, or it might be something I haven't even heard of. But eventually someone's going to come along with a vastly superior PvP design compared to WoW, and combine it with equivalent production values. Whoever that developer is, I think they stand a good chance to take 10-20% of WoW's player base, which would put them well into profitability.

Blizzard is constantly building a better WoW themselves.

Unfortunately, there are some problems that they will never be able to fix. For example, PvP balance is broken at the higher levels because the population balance is skewed. Across the entire game, there's 3 high-level Alliance players for every 2 high-level Horde (see here). On older servers, it's even worse, 3 Alliance for every 1 Horde (for example my old server, here). Even with the cross-realm battleground queues, Alliance players have to wait longer for games than Horde players. Once the Alliance players get a game though, they tend to win more games than the Horde because a larger population has more opportunities to run endgame content and acquire endgame epics, which in turn leads to a more powerful character.

The only way to truly eradicate that problem would be to do away with one of the core elements of the design, namely the whole concept of Alliance vs. Horde. Obviously that's something that just wouldn't make sense to do, it runs completely contrary to the flavor of the entire Warcraft series. I mean, the first game was called "Orcs and Humans," and not because they were drinking buddies. The only truly permanent way to get rid of this problem is to do away with the idea of player factions on a single server. That's what Fury, an upcoming PvP-centric MMO is doing. From their FAQ:

Are there going to be queues like WoW Battlegrounds?

No. Our realm architecture is very different to WoW and avoids queues or long waits.

In some games (like WoW) you fight within a realm where the total number of opponents is quite limited leading to long wait times. In other games (like Guild Wars) you fight in a single universe where the fights are random and social opportunities are scarce because you can't tell your friends from your enemies.

In Fury you live in a realm of friends and fight against other realms. This increases the number of your opponents and increases the social opportunities. Our matchmaking limits your maximum wait to a few minutes.

To think that WoW has a lock on the one true best design for an MMO is simply foolish. WoW has a pretty good model for 1-59 PvE leveling, but there are many ways to put these games together. I would argue that WoW's endgame is pretty boring, and the PvP model is clearly a half-assed afterthought. As such, I see plenty of potential for a well-designed PvP-centric MMO in the near future. It might be Fury, it might be Warhammer Online, or it might be something I haven't even heard of. But eventually someone's going to come along with a vastly superior PvP design compared to WoW, and combine it with equivalent production values. Whoever that developer is, I think they stand a good chance to take 10-20% of WoW's player base, which would put them well into profitability.

The entire reason I started playing Eve was because the lack of shards. During my time on WoW, I would run into friends IRL who would say they would be playing WoW, but unless I wanted to do the entire level grind again, I would never be able to hang out with them in game. So, if any of my friends started playing Eve, I could hook up with them and fly. It was good times.

Absolutely. It's always been a bit of a problem with other MMOs, but since they've been smaller, you just had about 8 servers that you might be spread out among. Eventually, I'd get all my friends on the same one.

WoW has, uh, this many realms. In the U.S.. Add to that that you really can't do much with your friends if you're 10 levels away or more, and it becomes pretty tough to wrangle all your friends together. With EVE, you just jump on, pop into your Teamspeak/Ventrilo server, and you're good to go. Very cool.

Now, I'm not sure EVE would scale to 5 million or so users without some serious work, but it'd be an interesting challenge.

Yes, but there are also four Horde races... so if players we evenly distributed you would expect to see 12.5% of the population playing each race. This is not the case.

You can solo right up to the level cap in World of Warcraft. Earn gold and reputation, do profession stuff. Craft equipment, or buy decent stuff at the Auction House.

After the level cap? Well, you can do the PvP battlegrounds. If your server has an even Alliance to Horde ratio, then you can PvP quite a bit. Matches are generally short, and you can earn honor and faction rewards.

Otherwise, Blizzard is adding more solo and 5-man endgame content in the near future. Quests to upgrade armor sets, that kind of thing. And you can always do the big-group stuff on the weekends.

Why do you believe what blizzard says?
get any census mod, go to a server and use it to measure the players for each faction.

I've done this several times on 3-4 different servers (admittedly not a large sample size but that was enough proof of the rumors for me) and every time i've seen the population is heavily in favour of alliance.

I have hear reports that there are a couple of servers that swing the other way though, but apparently they are in the extreme minority, and census sites back this up, for example this one: http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php which have more reason to try to be truthful than blizzard does