Server Population Chart

Hey ANet, i was wondering if you would be able to post this chart again but with server names after the alliance changes go live? I'm sure there's a lot of curious people as to who falls where in the chart.

I think we all know which server has the most

When the alliance goes live there won't be servers as we know them. They will be dynamically created each cycle (whatever that cycle is). They will be balanced based on wxp, guild alliances and a handful of other things as noted in the original announcement. The bottom line is that at the start of each new cycle there won't be servers with tons more players than the other servers, and so on.

Read the announcement and then the FAQ's... lots of good information in there if you don't read too far into the back and forth from forum posters.

Denial will never lead to rehabilitation. BG is an addiction, we understand. You will have a lot of time to reflect in 3rd place. Perhaps you may even read the original post and understand it. Don't know how much more straight forward Anet can be without divulging the metrics that you know can be gamed by the players.

@"Darksun.4702" said:Anet tried to explain that it's not showing player count or play time. It's a graph of their internal metric for calculating "activity".

.... with more detail on how they calculate their "activity" metric.

But we do know more detail on how they calculate population.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/26877/world-restructuring-faq/p1"We already use play hours to determine population status of a world"

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Yaks-Bend/page/1#post6513382"We have simulated other algorithms to measure world size and ultimately found that player hours gave us more accurate results because we are mostly comparing active WvW play."

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Transfers-Links-and-Population-Data/page/1#post6664495

The bar chart that was posted is basically player hours on a rolling average that is smoothed out over some unknown period of time (players have estimated about three weeks). There is nothing to misinterpret. I don't know how much more direct the dev should have been for you.

Player hours are also going to be used for composing the new worlds.

@Chaba.5410 said:

@"Darksun.4702" said:Anet tried to explain that it's not showing player count or play time. It's a graph of their internal metric for calculating "activity".

.... with more detail on how they calculate their "activity" metric.

Thanks for doing the research and pointing me to the sources. I now agree that the graph was for existing player hours, so thank you for that. The reason I believed differently is primarily due to this answer in your first link (the World Restructuring FAQ):

"The system uses stats like play hours in WvW, commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels to create worlds that are balanced. Some of the new worlds might have more hardcore players and some might have less but overall the new worlds should have similar play hours."

The quote used present voice, not future voice so I believed that they had already implemented this composite metric consisting of multiple metrics and used it in determining server linkings. Based on the other comments, I now believe he meant this to say "The system WILL USE stats like..." The ambiguity exists because the two sentences use present voice followed by future voice, implying one is happening now and one will happen in the future.

As a separate topic, your last comment said player hours are going to be used for composing new worlds. That's true, but it's important to note that they're saying they're developing this new player evaluation that is composed of several factors, which includes player hours.

So re-evaluating this graph as simple player hours, and knowing that BG had the most players at the time as well, certain aspects of my argument are still valid. For one, it was taken 4 months ago so continuing to use it as proof of anything in today's state isn't accurate. I still believe that if they were going to do it once, they should have made it a regular thing. Secondly, the use of partial transparency is still worse than either full transparency or no transparency. If they released the same graph today without server names, everyone would still assume BG was the first bar, regardless of whether that's true. It might be true, but BG is the only server that hasn't opened since then so attrition will have occurred in only one direction the whole time. It's possible one of the next few largest worlds have overtaken BG, but we don't know for sure. I believe SOS was full and without a link when this was taken, but they're open with a link now so they would have fallen far off how close they were to BG. If the only thing Anet obscured was the server name, I don't know why they did that since everyone knows the first bar is BG and that's the server everyone wants to use this data to hate on anyway. I suppose if there's an EU server that's been similarly dominant, it could protect that server. But otherwise, no one would care that SOS is 10% bigger than FA or something similar. But people would make it a big deal that BG is 7.5% bigger than the second biggest server and 16% bigger than the fourth biggest server.

Knowing the graph is purely player hours, we can also draw conclusions that BG isn't as overstacked in terms of player hours as people have been saying forever. The 15th most populated server combined with the two least populated servers would match up in player hours to BG. The 5th most populated server with just about any link would match up or exceed BG hours. The data implies that server linking is equalizing the population, but BG was winning due to other factors. If everyone else understood this graph was purely player hours, how was anyone still accusing BG of being overstacked and using this graph as proof? It shows the exact opposite.

Frankly I'd like Anet to be much more transparent with WvW data.

Number of man hours in WvW by server by week.Number of siege built.Size of largest squad during each skirmish.

It would be lovely if part of the Alliance revamp gives us API data like that to track.

@Caliburn.1845 said:Size of largest squad during each skirmish.

My gut instinct is saying 50 or less.