Population statistics: what happened?

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Sicom
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Joined: Thu May 12, 2005 2:39 am

Population statistics: what happened?

Post by Sicom »

I was browsing population status on various realms as I do somewhat regulary (about one per week), and I noticed awkward changes to the realms I play on..

Azgalor was once fairly balanced. As I recall the overall ratio was 1.4:1, and the higher you placed the minimuim level, the closer the balance became (ie: 1.2:1 levels 50-60). I take a look at it tonight and suddenly there's a ratio of 1.7:1 (a63% / h37%). The overall population seems to have dropped also.

Tichondrius did a complete one-eighty. Where the ratio use to be 1.3:1 in alliance's favor, it's now 1:1.2 in horde's favor. Its overall population is also higher than Azgalor's, where it use to be lower.

So, what happened?

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Rollie
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Post by Rollie »

This could be an effect of 'data aging'. The census display only displays data including characters 'seen' in the previous 30 days. It has been just over a month since the patch that allowed us to get timestamps in game, so this might be a by-product of that.

I'll do a little poking around and see what I can come up with though to help explain such a change.
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Alanthus

Post by Alanthus »

When a realm has fairly few census samples it's easy enough to have these kind of changes. You only need a few new census samples, some maybe showing weekend data which is usually a lot higher for most hours of the day, to affect dramatic changes in the overall ratio. Tichondrius does not have a lot of samples so it can easily change a lot.

Of course we're also seeing people quit the game, move to newly established servers, move from PvP to PvE servers etc. so there are a lot of possible reasons but I for one always look at how many data samples a server has before anything else. You'll notice that on servers with a lot more samples changes are smaller and slower.

heartless_
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Post by heartless_ »

For Azgalor I know I use to submit daily sometimes 2-3 a day... but now I do it every few days at most. I noticed Horde entries went down from about 25 to around 11 since I stopped submitting.

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