Wow Realm Population

[Dormie]

It's a sub based mmo , not pointless at all

Unless it's under like 400k players it's pretty irrelevant.

[Dystemper]

When I quit shortly after 8.1 I had already seen a massive increase in wait times for que. I saw my AH sales drop to nothing for Matt's. My active guilds died off before 8.1

[Haloswin]

People don't have to forcibly search for their guild / character to enter them into the system even as a seed - afaik, the seeding is done traditionally via /who scans (plus there're AH scans, so I'd personally add them as well).

I hear you -- and several others in the thread (thanks, guys) -- on the info for your server missing important details. It is expected for the data to have holes, what's important is to determine how big they are. I cannot come up with a useful test that would also be surmountable (eg, that I could do myself in a couple of evenings) at the moment, but I might in the future. For now, let's assume that the data has holes, that we don't know how big they are, so the data is mostly useful for dynamics - eg, for changes. Maybe later we can make the data useful for more than changes. Although there's always this big unknown of how to translate characters to players which will prevent us from going to players even if we solve everything else.

Yeah no idea what the system's limitations are but the top 4 most progressed/active guilds on my server -- all of them working on mythic bosses don't even show up as having four active members.

So, something about how it gathers info is lacking... I get that people want to attach a number to the player base, I just don't think there is currently a reliable outside model for it. Other than Blizz doing a 180 and once again reporting numbers I don't think anyone will ever know other than anecdotal evidence based on their playing experience. I think everyone agrees there are less people playing than in past years.

[sam86]

2.5 million character only !? wtf ?
even the most casual player i know these days at least use 2 characters
and since altholic is very common in wow, i'd say that at most there is 1 million sub!

China has historically had twice the amount of players as EU and US, so a combined 7mil characters seems reasonable.

except in wrath, wow 12+ million sub peak had zero chineese (officially at least), wrath was released after cata revamp was out for china and it was a big joke, heck u can even now see how 'wrath' is implemented in china, lot of bosses have different models (crappy older ones), even DK is called unhappy knight in chineese or something

WoW is insanely popular in China, just look at how well the movie did there compared to the west. I’d expect double the EU/US numbers from Asia.

movie profit has nothing to do with game, tranformers for example made big profit there, in general chineese market love their CGI since their local movie industry cgi is sh8t, and wow had amazing cgi

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Unless it's under like 400k players it's pretty irrelevant.

no it is... ppl keep talk that wow has the most sub, while FF seems to beat it, but that isn't the point
wow costs far more than most mmo out there that has half that number, low sub mean even sh8t content, u can brag all u want that we have more active players than runescap but in end wow profit is probably even lower than runescape right now
And i can't understand why blizzard did that, they had a great comeback in legion, why did BFA be... like that? why it is obvious how half assed it was in many aspects, making it at most half of legion effort
I LOVE wow and i don't want it to die, but i don't want WoD either, if they don't want to work Legion hard, end it then pls

[Dormie]

no it is... ppl keep talk that wow has the most sub, while FF seems to beat it, but that isn't the point
wow costs far more than most mmo out there that has half that number, low sub mean even sh8t content, u can brag all u want that we have more active players than runescap but in end wow profit is probably even lower than runescape right now
And i can't understand why blizzard did that, they had a great comeback in legion, why did BFA be... like that? why it is obvious how half assed it was in many aspects, making it at most half of legion effort
I LOVE wow and i don't want it to die, but i don't want WoD either, if they don't want to work Legion hard, end it then pls

You're just showing me people only want to know WoW subs to twist the data into supporting their own ideas.
And I find it hard to believe that a game with a fraction of WoWs average Twitch views has more players. Pretty sure Runescape has more active players than FF.

[MrLachyG]

As I say every time population is brought up: My instance Q times are the same and my auctions sell the same, I have no issues with population.

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Back in the day people used to use sub numbers as an indicator of how the game is doing, Blizz stopped releasing sub numbers so now players are literally dying inside without having a metric to point at lol

and that's the thing. having some magic number is not an indicator of how the game is doing. if you like it, you will play. if you don't like it, you won't play. it's that simple

[Nerovar]

Unless it's under like 400k players it's pretty irrelevant.

Do you honestly think they'll pump out the same amount of content for significantly fewer players?

[NtflxnChill]

You're just showing me people only want to know WoW subs to twist the data into supporting their own ideas.
And I find it hard to believe that a game with a fraction of WoWs average Twitch views has more players. Pretty sure Runescape has more active players than FF.

Runescape has more players than WoW so i'd say that's pretty accurate.

[rda]

But you are describing yourself that the methodology has an implicit bias. There are discreet categories of characters that it cannot pick up and it doesn't even make the effort to account for that bias. In polling when you know that some form of bias (exclusion and possibly attrition) is unavoidable you tend to use historic data to identify that bias and correct against it. And the presence of selection bias indicates that the methodology is sampling the population. Even a very broad sample is still a sample, I am not using it as a dirty word here.

This isn't a bias, this is a known limitation. It's not "cannot pick", it's "decides not to pick", there's a world of difference. As I said, we can talk about enumerating all active characters excluding those below level 10 and excluding those who aren't in guilds and never post anything on the AH - this is good enough for a lot of purposes. This might even be good enough for the purpose of establishing the total number of active characters - if someone, say, measures that the number of characters ignored that way is relatively small, say, within 10% of all.

You are objecting to not having no limitations, and that's a wrong objection to make. There are always limitations, whether you design them yourself or not. For an extreme example, if we just have direct access to Blizzard databases and can do whatever we want with them for however long to capture the stats that we need, that's still not good enough - because the moment you measure the total number of whatever (subs / characters / anything) to be X, that value is already outdated. The correct way to go about limitations is to embrace them and quantify them in error bars. I think the errors bars here might be very tight (small).

[Dormie]

Do you honestly think they'll pump out the same amount of content for significantly fewer players?

No but we're not at that point and doomsayers knowing the sub count has nothing to do with that.

[rda]

No but we're not at that point and doomsayers knowing the sub count has nothing to do with that.

For the record, so far in the thread, there are many more people talking about the doomsayers and people objecting to trying to measure subs / characters because that's supposedly unhealthy or irrelevant, than the actual doomsayers.

I'd think about that.

[Puupi]

3-4M sounds about right. No way they have more than 4M or less than 3M right now.

You realize that's characters, not accounts/subscriptions?

If I had my subscription active, I would bump up the number by about 20 characters. (13 120's on horde, 7 on alliance IIRC).

[Qnubi]

You realize that's characters, not accounts/subscriptions?

If I had my subscription active, I would bump up the number by about 20 characters. (13 120's on horde, 7 on alliance IIRC).

Only if you do something significant on those characters.

[Puupi]

Only if you do something significant on those characters.

I know, I would (I did).

m+/lfr/raid

[Qnubi]

I know, I would (I did).

m+/lfr/raid

On all 20 characters? :O

I thought I am dedicated to the game (usually play 4-5 alts and do everything with them).

[Puupi]

On all 20 characters? :O

Not every day all the time of course. But as these populations are calculated on a ~quarterly basis, I definitely would have been doing something with all of those chars in the span of a couple of months.

[Lurker1]

As I say every time population is brought up: My instance Q times are the same and my auctions sell the same, I have no issues with population.

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Back in the day people used to use sub numbers as an indicator of how the game is doing, Blizz stopped releasing sub numbers so now players are literally dying inside without having a metric to point at lol

its driveing them nuts but i love it now!

[rda]

Not every day all the time of course. But as these populations are calculated on a ~quarterly basis, I definitely would have been doing something with all of those chars in the span of a couple of months.

They measure "active" as "active in 2 last weeks", so perhaps in your case there would be less than 20 active characters, but, of course, more than 1 - perhaps 3-5.

[Erwarth]

I'm always very cautious when I browse census-type site but this one seems not too bad.

I checked on my guild and number are definitely lower than reality.

My guild is listed with 12 active members. We raid twice a week with 11-15 guild member and some of us play actively 5-8 alts so it should be at least 30 - 40 active characters.

I don't think you can estimate sub number from this site

[Puupi]

They measure "active" as "active in 2 last weeks", so perhaps in your case there would be less than 20 active characters, but, of course, more than 1 - perhaps 3-5.

Well wowprogress and raider.io track the whole expansion and their numbers are quite similar. As long as the character has killed any raid boss or completed any m+, it's in the system.

Oh and just saw from the OP: ""Active character: a character that has performed any of the following activities within 14 days since it was last seen: gained levels, looted something notable (my remark: to appear in the API log, that log skips loot that it does not think is notable in order to be manageable), made a honorable kill, changed or transmogged gear or placed something in the Auction House.""

Well my 20 characters would definitely be active with those metrics.