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I'm a bit curious, Lordaeron was hitting 12k people at day and had over 4k in Q at times. What changed? Also I know icecrown is hitting 12k with 300 people or so in Q, but I also remember the first day Icecrown launched and Lordaeron still had 3k in Q and Icecrown had 1.5k in Q.
Guess I'm just curious where 4000 people just disappeared to.
For a LONG time DW & RAG were peaking at 3500-4000 during prime time. After the merge it stands to reason that there should have been around 8000 players on Icecrown during prime time.
Even if you add a few that made characters due to the 'hype', there is still a MASSIVE influx of unaccounted new mystery players. I guess they came from Lord, because that mystery number is around 4-5k.
see that is what I thought as well, but it doesn't explain the first weekend with both servers being well over population cap. I wouldn't think that people who didn't play on DW & RAG would suddenly want to play on a x7 server if they weren't already. (or does population caps play a role in what servers people want to play on? and they were just avoiding DW and RAG because they had less people?) I would expect some switching just to avoid Q times, but at the same time now Icecrown has the Q and Lord Doesn't so even that doesn't make sense.Quote:
Originally Posted by woodhauler
Also both realms sat at population cap for a week, its just been in the last week or so that population started to slide.
The whole thing is just kinda weird to be honest.
it is exactly what they did - migrated from frustrating "hardcore" (tryhard) realm to the Best ONeQuote:
Originally Posted by Webber90003
and dont forget that half of your realm were players from Rag and DW obv, so they are finnally at home now
Yeah, I pretty much called this last year. Lordearon was popular for it's content and while many people might think they like the hardcore system not that many will stick to it. I figure the remaining people on Lordaeron are still there because they actually enjoy the hardcore environment or they've put too much effort into a character to ditch it. My opinion at least.
Original Lordearon (before moltdown) was actually in pretty serious trouble. It was peaking at just over 1k players near the end. Meanwhile, DW & RAG were experiencing Q's frequently, sometimes daily. In the old Lord forum section, there were PAGES of posts brainstorming how to increase the declining population, and how bad the state of the realm had degraded to. When I first started playing here I read each servers forum pages to decide which realm to play on, and I remember those posts pretty clearly. The community on Lord seemed to be the least-toxic, but the population's steady decline was a MAJOR problem. It had started out VERY STRONG (just like current-day Lordaeron did), but unfortunately, over time, the population flat-lined.
There were legitimate outside reasons PARTIALLY to blame for the descent. One of them was the decision to allow server transfers from the high rate realms to Lord, which was done to HELP the failing population. This led to inflation, and lots of other problems. In the end the realm was NOT doing well at all. Meanwhile the high rate realms were THRIVING.
In spite of those outside reasons, I believe there is an underlying reason why, over time, high rate realms thrive, and 1x realms struggle to break even (and usually decline severely in population). Keep in mind this is OVER TIME... aka not 1 month, 6 months, or even 1 year. I'm talking about over several years. The game is old, the content is old, most people have played it A LOT, and many people have played it in retail when it was live, all at 1x. Playing the game at 1x is fun the first time. It can be fun the second time, and some people even prefer 1x ALL THE TIME. Many people are like this, and I very much understand how fun the game can be at 1x.
However, from my experience (which can be taken as anecdotal if you like), the charm of 1x typically fades away eventually, the more you play the game. I started playing this game in march of 2005. I leveled dozens of characters in every expansion, on all kinds of servers, on both factions, all the way to patch 5.3 in MOP. Hundreds of characters leveled and played at 1x in retail over ~10 years. I will NEVER play 1x ever again. That said, I don't enjoy SUPER high rate leveling either. Original RAG was far too fast to even semi-enjoy areas & zones. I picked DW which at the time was 5x, and I felt that was the ideal rate. It cut off the grindy, boring, repetitive aspect of the game, but I could still enjoy the leveling experience. Some people prefer even faster rates, and I can certainly understand that viewpoint as well.
It should be noted that there are always exceptions to the rule. Nost is a fairly good example. Their quality and hype brought in many players, and thrived. Among the plethora of other vanilla high-rate servers, the 1x Nost realms were by far the most popular in the world. I think this very much has to do with 2 factors though. The first being that vanilla players in general are MUCH more fanatical about experiencing blizz-clone features & playstyle, and 1x is critical to that goal. The second is that Nost NEVER opened a high rate server with the same quality as their 1x realms. It would have been a VERY interesting study to see what would have happened if they did.
The population decline of present-day Lordaeron is not only expected, it is inevitable. The only reason it was so HIGHLY populated in the last few months, is due to the high-rate servers having the old core. Now that they have the updated core, the higher rates will simply draw more people than 1x rates will. This is easily observable across the entire private server history going back long before Molten existed.
In the coming months, we will see Lordaeron decline, and Icecrown thrive. This is the law of averages. People tend to take the route of least resistance, and 7x, RDF, non-buffed pve is simply easier to manage than 1x, no RDF, and buffed pve.
I'm not arguing for or against either server, this is simply what has already happened in other pservers, what has already happened here at molten, and what will happen again with present-day Lordaeron & Icecrown. It has already started.
Hype factor, except that the population didnt actually plummet because the Lord migration filled the void insteadQuote:
Originally Posted by Webber90003