WarcraftRealms.com

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?

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.

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.

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.