Back in the day on the server selection screen it used to say number accounts logged in. When did this change and what was the logic on changing it? I'd much rather have a number than a Low/Med/High In 99 I started on Vallon Zek because it had the lowest population and my logic was LEAST lag.... I had no idea what PVP back then lol was a rude awakening.
I remember them using real numbers in all of the Beta versions starting in 1998. I was thinking they stopped posting actual numbers when EQ went live but maybe they continued for a little while. I figured they just wanted to keep it a company secret when they stopped using real numbers.
I started EQ in August of 2000. They posted #s for server pop at that time. It's been a long time, but I wanna say it was sometime in the next year that they stopped posting actual numbers (i.e. by the end of 2001).
They changed it around 2002/3 when number started dropping, I think they were afraid people would see the numbers falling and "jump ship" if they saw them falling badly. As for population now I just did a survey this last weekend to see what the variance was between servers. I just checked general chat and how many traders were up in the bazaar on each server. While this wont give you an exact count because many do not join general, I believe the percentage who do not would be very similar across all servers. Anyhow this is what I found Live Servers: Bristlebane - 801 in General, 287 Traders Firiona Vie - 800 in General, 502 Traders Cazic Thule - 743 in General, 255 Traders Xegony - 643 in General, 219 Traders Bertoxxlous - 585 in General, 237 Traders Drinal - 589 in General, 164 Traders The Rathe - 536 in General, 171 Traders Antonius Bale - 489 in General, 137 Traders Erollisi Marr - 400 in General, 225 Traders Tunare - 399 in General, 176 Traders Luclin - 398 in General, 179 Traders Vox - 397 in General, 65 Traders Povar - 333 in General, 155 Traders Trakanon - 89 in General, 5 Traders Brekt - 87 in General, 13 Traders Zek - 67 in General, 15 Traders Progression Servers: Mangler - 1200 in General, 502 Traders Ragefire - 333 in General, 53 Traders Selo - 253 in General, 75 Traders Coirnav - 198 in General, 72 Traders Phinigal - 166 in General, 51 Traders Lockjaw - 136 in General, 9 Traders Miragul - 76 in General, 10 Traders Fippy - 5 in General, 0 Traders
Question from someone who takes lots of breaks..... returned (again) last month, and hadn't paid attention to the chats much. When did they remove the 300 cap on chat channels? I remember it used to be, general would hit 300, and then when you logged in, you'd get put in general2. I'm glad that changed.
Thank you for this, this clearly proves that Everquest official > P99 in terms of community size and popularity.
Agnarr is > P99, and it somehow didn't make the above list. Now that I think about it, I've never seen Agnarr and P99 in the same room at the same time. Coincidence? Hmmm...
I play 99% on Tunare and we are running two general chats for the last month at least. One has to hit 400 to open the second one. So I disagree with your count. Others have commented on FV that there are 4 or more chats full. There is also all the free accounts that cannot get into general chat but are stuck in newplayerschat There is no way to get an accurate count between all the ways to be in the game. This is old info from 2014 where some guy tracked population on every server for every hour he was awake for 17 days - and came up with this estimate on what defines "low", "medium" and "high" Low - 0-500 or Low 0-750 Med - 500-1000 or Med 750-1500 High - 1001+ or High 1501+
The cap is now 400 and it's still not great to be honest as sometimes instead of putting you in general2 (or 3 or 4 in the case of FV at prime time) it just denies general exists and does nothing.
I wonder how this would stack up at a peak time for Antonious though, or if you did this at peak antonious time but not peak other server time. I switched to Antonious 5 years ago and havnt played on non euro live servers only progression, so unaware of their population.
Probably only interesting to me and four other people but the bazaar crashed a few days ago and when this happens (or after a patch) it takes a long time for the trader numbers to completely recover. It's been as high as 650 before when most of the US was asleep and the zone uptime was > 10 days which suggests to me a decent percentage of those who run traders only check on them every few days. That said I know a lot of people who don't run a trader at all or only do so sporadically to move raid currency which is just as well as I'm not sure the server could cope with many more.
Any and all players tryna figure out server populations with out having access to the game servers themselves. Makes me giggle..
As of a few years ago when I used to check in now and then there's a massive spike in people logged on during raid times (so GMT 18:00 and a few hours after that) but at other times it was very quiet.
Woops, sorry missed Agnarr, it was: Agnarr 230 in General and 77 Traders. and I did my survey around noon pacific time on Saturday.
I did not do my survey in peak time, and my intent was not to capture the total or peak population, just to show a spread between the server populations in a snapshot of time.
Server population can be tricky but general is a good go to , but its true many log out of general some dont log into it , but its a safe bet the populations are about 15 percent bigger then just general .also this is a 24 hour a day 7 day a week game played by people all over Ancient Earth , is this as popular as 2001 no ! But its still here and I love to play EQ YiMin