I do not believe that the population status is capable of reading anything other than "high". Since mega servers came up It has never changed. If im in front of my TV when the game comes back online after a restart, or after an update, hotfix, dlc, whatever reason it was offline and now back... the moment it comes back online it already reads "high" The funniest is when the message pops that your in a low population phase and it still reads "high" when there are very few people even in the phase you wind up in. Here is what I would like to know: what is the threshold that dictates a high population?
you cant trust that icon at all itll show population high even while the server your on is still offline
It used to be that everyone was on one server. That kinda meant there was only one phase. Now the megaservers can support multiple phases. I suspect the population measure is still based on pre-megaserver standards. If I had to guess... LOW POP: Less than 25% of one phase is filled MEDIUM POP: Between 25% to 75% of one phase filled HIGH POP: greater than 75% of one phase is filled (or multiple phases are filled) It's like web hosts that report 99.999% uptime because they use a 6 month rolling average. It's measured using a technique and using thresholds that make things always look good. I agree that you can't count on it to tell you anything. Even if you're in a low population phase, the servers are high because another phase is still mostly full.
thats fine, if it had any truth to it. the population reads "high" the moment the server comes back up. i would argue that there is no numeric that dictates the status at all. it simply high and has no basis for its status.
I was only making a guess. I would also guess that reading the population doesn't occur live or on-demand. There's probably a scheduled job that runs and checks the population once every 5 (maybe 10 or 30) minutes to present to players on the character select screen and various websites. That would make sense if it turned out to be an expensive query (or merely perceived as expensive, either way).
that makes plenty of sense, that it would give them a read every 5 minutes... but they took the time to provide us with the line in the log in screen and i would argue its merit. I think it would be nice if we had a better population tool. even if it was still very general. maybe something like: under 5000 10k-20k 20k and higher. i dont know if my numbers are realistic they are just for example
i'd guess i'm remembering a description used before MegaServer, but it was said that the population had to do with registrations (seems fitting for when there were named servers, but still was bonkers.... why registered? a registered cap per server?). Now with Mega, yeah, population is pointless. A phase gets full, another is made. Remember which chat channels can reach more than one phase, & u'll be fine. (maybe)
The mega servers originally said "MEGA" instead of high when it was 1st introduced... then the population began dropping.
I honestly don't think its working. Its either not working and they have forgoabout it, or they purposely just leaave it on high,
There's no way it works. USPC right after maintenance is like a ghost town for an hour, yet that still always says High. I can literally be the only one in the HoD and it will show High. Eh.. but who knows.
