World Of Warcraft: Some More Information On Realm Populations

Many of us have been there...the dying realm with less than 50 max level characters on every night. The seemingly desolate end-game instance scene with one (or two if you're lucky) BT/Hyjal guilds sucking up all the potential players.

If the amount of posts asking to save these downtrodden realms on the forums mean anything, this is a bigger problem than Blizzard admits. Or is it? Drysc doesn't seem to agree:

We're in the process of implementing alternate solutions to help assist the lower population realms. The problem here is that Agamaggan is not really what would be considered a "low population" realm, it's not even in the bottom 25 realms. While it's not at capacity (it's at around a 55% nightly pop) there are quite a few realms below it that we would need to focus our attention on first, such as Coilfang (around a 30% nightly pop) and 10 or so other realms like it.

Just to compare there are technically around 200 realms that aren't actually hitting capacity (no queues at any time for a month+) out of about 220 total US realms. While we would like all realms to be near capacity, there is a middle ground that still allows an extremely functional and fun play experience. A lot of the realms live in this "middle area" of capacity, and they have extremely lively economies and interactions. Before the population cap increase with Burning Crusade they might even be considered "high population".

In any case, when realms fall below that middle ground, which Agamaggan has not, then we need to start taking some action.

Our focus is going to be on those realms that are falling below a capacity we believe is acceptable to the players, and our intent for the ability to play the game with any amount of comfort. After that we would then continue to move up and focus on other realms.

I've played on both high, medium, and low population servers myself, ranging from launch to BC launch in release date, and I can easily echo the concerns of those players Drysc is responding to, it is a nasty and frustrating place to be. Hopefully Blizzard can come up with something soon before many of these servers fade totally into obscurity.