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Overall and on specific servers...

(prime time concurrent number of players)

It might be a tad early to get really good data on this but I have a few early impressions and I'm curious about what impressions others have?

Population on the server and faction (Bleeding Hollow/Alliance) increased markedly from around christmas to a few days after release (as expected). I was expecting prime time population to continue to increase for a month or two after the release but that doesn't seem to be occuring, in fact as of now it seems that population on BH alliance prime time is already down to the same levels as about a month before release (down 500+ from peak, still around 200 more than before christmas but there has been no free transfers from BH). Part of this is of course people returning to other servers after testing something or people who had problems with stability on home servers but it still seems to me that the population increase associated with an expansion is of much shorter duration for BC than expansions for other major MMO's, especially considering how long it's been in the making and how much more of the same game it seems to offer in my limited perspective.

Perhaps other have different impressions from their servers?

I completely agree with you. Well my take on it is that people have hit 70, which I am very close to do so, and they realize it is more of the same old thing.

My server is medium pop but we did see a couple queues in the first week of BC. Now there is no way we will be seeing anymore queues. There is at most 1400 people on for the Alliance and the Horde are probably at about 1100.

I just don't think Blizzard has changed anything in this game to make it so people want to stay around. Once some new game comes around that has to offer a lot of what WoW has, I see people jumping ship no problem. Right now, I would be a little upset to leave, but honestly once I hit 70, buy my epic flying mount, what else is there left to do?!

Same on Silvermoon. Its back to being the way it normally is. I can't remember when I saw more than 1000 hordes on at once. Alliance side is back to being about 2100 or so. We still dont have any queues. I think it may pick up in about a month or so when alot more people get to 70 and guilds start raiding again which will require people to be online at certain times, like the popular Fri - Sun Evenings

Yeah, on Mal'ganis we got hit pretty hard with queues for a long time, but I haven't seen one in quite some time as of late. Right after BC hit I was seeing about 2300+ horde on during peak hours; now it's back down to about 2000. I still see more alliance around than I used to remember... I guess more horde took the free transfers off than alliance did.

Well, people seem to have settled back into the normal routine after the release. We couldn't expect people to continue playing withj the feverish pace that had us all consumed.

People have gone back to how it was pre-bc for the most part. Atleast on darkspear, while 70's outnumber the rest, if you combine the 61-69, it's atleast triple the 70's still.

I never did much raiding before BC. I always preferred leveling new characters over playing night after night just to get a new chestpiece.

But, I had a friend who did lots of raiding. He says the new game at 70 is entirely different than 60, since 40-man raids are gone. His guild is less focused, now that they don't have to keep a rigid raiding schedule. This is definately different, but possibly not a good thing for them.

From what I've read about the bosses in the new instances, it seems like there is a lot more variety in tricks needed to defeat them. Tailoring a group for each of the instances sounds much more interesting than it was before. http://wow.gameamp.com has pretty good writeups on the bosses, and maps for each of the new instances.

The reputation situation is far more complicated than before. I don't know if it's interesting enough to cause many more people to start grinding reputation, though.

Also, I think that the new world pvp is really well-designed. The rewards in the outland regions will be worth fighting for, so I imagine that a lot of people will continue to form groups for it for quite a while.