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An interesting observation based on census data.

For some reason, there is not much correlation between maximum number of active players and server status ( low/medium/high/queued ). I have a character on Doomhammer. My server currently has the largest number of active players among both US and EU servers ( 30,720 players level 10+ seen in the last 30 days ). One would expect it to be queued all the time, right? Wrong. Apparently, Doomhammer spends most of the time in Medium. Compare with Warsong, which only has 18k players, but its population is High or Queued 75% of the time.

An important difference here is that Warsong is PvP and Doomhammer is PvE. But even Blackrock (PvE, 18k players) spends more time in High/Queued state than Doomhammer.

Another thing to note. Activity numbers will play a larger role in server status vs overall population numbers.

The total number of characters seen number is actually a better gauge of how many census are done on the server than actual population. In fact, a very heavily populated server like Warsong will never appear to have as many characters as more accessible server simply due to the fact that people can't log on to do a census without spending 40 minutes or more in queue.

Look at the activity numbers instead, a server like Warsong has something like 1800+ alliance & 1400+ horde online at prime time, that's a full server