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The following is an article written for cruel-gaming.com
It's a simple question , in this case I am asking how many players per a single game world, server or shard is enough for a player to feel like they are in an open , expansive but alive and thriving world.
Let me throw some context at you, world of warcraft has about 10 million or so players, each server might handle about 12 thousand with about 3 or 4 thousand players being online at any given time, rough estimations here people so if you have hard facts I'm more than happy accept them.
Now I should make it clear, when I talk about wow in this article I am refereeing to PRE-TBC, so vanilla wow, not the current expansion.
Now with wow I could venture out into the world and not go more than a few minutes without running into some random player out doing his own thing, and this was really cool, there were enough people per server that most zones felt alive with players, and you got to know a few names but for the most part it was new faces all the time, this gave us the feeling of a thriving world, and with the game needing about 3 months to hit the level cap putting in decent hours this lasted quite a while, the reason I am not talking about the current expansion is that you can clear level 1 to level cap in 3 days, skipping a vast world of content and hardly ever seeing another player as you do it, that's not what anyone wants.
So when it comes to player numbers, per server or shard, I think blizzard got the balance perfect, so even though there are about 10 million players playing the game globally, I really only care about the 3 or 4 thousand that I have a chance to meet in my local game world, which makes we wonder, and ask the above question, how much is enough, why is it that when an mmo launches and grabs about 400 thousand players the community at large deem it a failure.
It's not a failure just because its total players are not 10 million like world of warcraft, and the people who think this are just being narrow minded, it all boils down to player experience, if I log into a game and have the chance to run into 4 thousand other players, and regularly do, and the world feels alive, then I really don't care if the global population is 4 thousand, or 4 million, or 10 I only care about the number of players I can play with.
So, I have a test for you, we will call it the population test, I want each of you to log into your favorate mmo , go out to some mid level quest or mission hub and start doing the missions or quests , start a clock play for 1 hour and count the total number of unique players you see along the way.
Back in vanila, I would expect to run into about 40+ unique players in any given hour, more for specific area's, question in south shore for example in any given hour you could run into over 100 people, strangle thorn vail was another hot spot, try this test in those zones now and your lucky if you spot 3 or 4 people.
So try this test in your mmo of choice, 1 hour, mid level questing/missions out in the world, and count the players, I think you might be surprised by your results. and I know I would love to hear them, so feel free to post them bellow.
If we get enough data I will create a small table to show the results in an easy to read manner, I will also echo this post on other websites to get a bigger pool of players and their data.
I would love to hear the results from some of you, and from the games your playing now, needs to be an open mmo, can be free to play or pay to play, and you just need to count the number of players you meet over the course of 1 hour, while playing in a mid level area, basically not a level capped area.
Please use this..
Game :
Server :
Area :
Players :
Thoughts :