Hey Guys, 1. Intro // Monthly Notes First of all, for those who missed it last month. You can find my spreadsheets that I base my inaccurate assumptions here >> http://eqservers.imgur.com/ -- There you will find results for each specific server as well as the monthly averages. It also makes it easier to compare with previous months. I should mention that all times are Central Time Zone. This month was significantly less populated than both February and March. I believe it is safe to say that we will not see March 2014 population numbers again for a while. Heroic characters, AA auto-grant, and Anniversary events make for a busy game. 2. Rankings Tier 1 - Cazic Thule (117) & Bristlebane (108) Tier 2 - Erollisi Marr (42), Xegony (36), Bertoxxulous (31), Luclin (29), The Rathe (27), and Povar (21) Tier 3 - Tunare (3), Firiona Vie (1), Drinal (1) Tier 4 - Antonius Bayle (0) & Vox (0) Tier 5 - Test, Fippy, Trakanon, Vulak'Aerr, Zek, and Beta 3. Detailed Analysis & Server Specific Notes First off, congrats to Cazic Thule for being the busiest server this month. It started off that way, and stayed that way for the month. Towards the end of the month Bristlebane seemed to start "catching up", but CT was definitely High status more often this month. Bristlebane had held the number one position in both February and March. The Tier 1 servers are much, much busier than the Tier 2, and the same for the Tier 2 compared to the Tier 3. Erollisi Marr and Xegony were busier than Povar, but in general the populations for those six servers are nearly identical. Firiona Vie was very busy in February, but has continued a sharp decline in population over the last 60 days. It hit high status on April 1st, and I did not see it achieve that population level again for the rest of the month. Neither Antonius Bayle nor Vox hit high status. In fact both were low just as often, if not more often than they were Med status. The population of these two servers however appear almost exactly the same. Obviously with very different play times. Only other thing of note is that the few times I checked Vox's actual zones, the tutorial had several players in it, while the other servers tutorial zone would have only 2 or 3 players currently in it. 4. New Info/Tidbits One new thing I have been doing this month is trying my best to figure out what the numbers are for each status. This is impossible, and even my best research and guess could very easily be off. With that disclaimer given, I have been checking more closely the amount of people I find on the server right as the status changes from Low to Med or High to Med etc. One thing I can do, is figure out how many people I can confirm are online and watch for patterns. I have mostly focused on "Low" status this month. I currently believe that Low Status is 0-500 players. I feel very good about this number. At the very least, I can state that a server will still register as Low status while having at least 461 players on it. Medium status is harder to decipher since the more players online, the more spread out they are and the margin of error increases. Since I believe Sony is like most people and prefer pretty round numbers, my best guess at this point is that Low = 0-500 Med = 501-1000 High = 1000+ 5. FAQ Why do you do this? OCD list-making? I don't know. I've always been curious about MMO populations, and use to look at the actual numbers 10 years ago before they went private. So you have way too much time on your hands? Perhaps. I use excel for a number of things, so making a spreadsheet requires little effort. Tracking the numbers on an hourly basis is easy when all you have to do is glance at Sony's server status on your phone. This is cool! How can I help? I have no idea unless you work for SOE. Without going into detail, Rorce of EQResource has looked into ways to help make this information more complete (and easier to record). I appreciate Lila's idea of using imgur to easily show the data without having to maintain a website. All in all, I want EQ 1 to stick around for another 15 years. It has brought me many good memories from being a teenage gamer and hardcore raider playing 15 hours a day, to a causal player with a family many years later. 6. Links // Previous Months Excel Spreadsheet Vault - http://eqservers.imgur.com/ February 2014 Thread - https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/server-population.208763/ March 2014 Thread - https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/server-populations-march-edition.209642/ ....as always. Any comments or questions, just post here.
99% of everything I assume is based off the data that SOE supplies on their server status page. That is such as "High, Med, Low". There are exceptions, but generally the servers refresh themselves every 3-5 mins, rarely longer than 15mins goes by before the server updates itself. There is nearly 48 hours of data missing at the beginning of April since SOE was having trouble getting the status page to display correctly (it showed all servers as Down off and on). The tidbit I have about my guess to the actual numbers of what Low, Med, and High represent is based on how many people I can confirm were positively online. The easiest/fastest way I've been able to get those numbers is checking Baz, GL, and PoK all in a period of about 2 mins since those three zones are where most people congregate and they are very close to each other. So for example, to get the "I truly believe Low status is 0-500", I continually checked a server that read as Low. Especially if I knew it was about to turn Medium, or I had seen it JUST switch to Low from Medium. Over the period of a month, I checked repeatedly and generally found 300-400 players in those 3 zones. Anytime I found more than that, the server was higher than Low. Twice I found those zones to add up to 400+ but less than 500. So basically, I have never found more than 500 players confirmed online and the server register as Low. This method is very crude and I just started doing this in the last few weeks. I don't place too much emphasis on it. Another thing to remember is that years ago in the old forums, it was stated that an ideal server population was 1500-2000 at peak. When servers were hitting 2500-3000 was when everybody was complaining about overpopulation and SOE quickly started rolling out more servers.
Well, aside from working at SOE, I can only go by what the website (https://www.soe.com/status) says. It shows there when the last time it was updated/refreshed. If you check now for example, most are 3-4 mins, a few are 10-15 mins. If you google everquest server populations, you'll find that people have been asking for this information or trying to accurately guesstimate server populations. I can't think of a better way to do this so far.
There used to be server population numbers, but when Blizzard released WoW, SOE's EQ decided to hide that information/data.
Yep. I was playing when the patch happened. I guess it was smart on their end, and all MMOs for the most part (other than DAoC who semi-hides their numbers by making one server look like 5) do not show their numbers.
I remembered playing when the server screen numbers changed. I couldn't remember when. I remember thinking it was because of new games coming out and the fact that players had real numbers to use when complaining about overcrowding. It also seemed to be an issue with new people often times selecting the busiest servers thus making server-population even worse. I now remember why...I remember the patch that changed it. Heck, I remember where I was sitting that day. ------------------------------ September 11, 2001 3:00 am ------------------------------ ** Miscellaneous Updates ** - The server selection screen now only gives information on whether or not a server is up instead of providing player counts. In addition, the "count" option on the /who command has been restricted to internal personnel. Servers on the server selection screen are still ordered from least-populated to most populated in order to assist players in choosing the least populated server. Obviously the aforementioned MMO did not have any influence over this. Also, although I remember Alan or Gordon stating that 1500-2000 was an ideal peak population, it appears I remember incorrectly. Here is where Brad gave a slight indication of what they thought was a good number back on Jan 2001: Aradune talks about Server Population Issues: "Hi all, I wanted to bring up this issue officially and also talk about some aspects of it, and how we are looking to solve some of the issues. First of all, we are working to come up with a new target server population at peak hours number. Our inclination at this point is a number somewhere between 2300 and 2500 players during peak hours. We feel we need to adjust this number because of how much Velious has added to EverQuest's size and quantity of content. We also feel that undercrowding is probably more detrimental to the game than overcrowding, in that while crowded areas are frustrating in that there is greater competition involved, there are some advantages to it (help from others when an encounter goes bad, help with CRs, etc.). (No, I'm not saying Overcrowding is good overall -- so please don't misunderstand me). Undercrowding, however, can mean a player can't find anyone to play with, and thus leaves. In other words, that frustration can be worse. There have also been some problems with packet loss and link death, specifically on E'Ci, when populations are growing high. So, what are we going to do about all of this? Well, before launching new servers we're going continue to analyze where players are at, what zones are crowded, and what zones are underused. Significant experience bonuses are going in next patch for underused zones (mostly dungeons). With E'Ci specifically we found out that after a recent hardware change, the network interface was incorrectly configured -- last night this was fixed, so please tell us if anything has improved. Also, when there are network problems out there with the Internet and a large group of players go link dead, this can cause zones to go down. We are working on this issue as well. So, there you have it, both gameplay and hardware solutions we hope will have significant effect. And please understand that any hesitation to launch new servers is due to undercrowding fears only -- if after these adjustments and attempts to better utilize all the zones we have it turns out target populations are lower than we believed, we will launch new servers, both split and new. Thanks, and we look forward to your comments and feedback. -Brad"
I disagree. The aforementioned MMO development was in full swing. Population count or population trends is useful information, especially while in development. It also makes the competing marketing team's job easier.
You may be right since it was announced Sept 2nd, 2001. When I think of 2001, I'm more inclined to think of AO and DAoC. Especially the latter.I don't want to dwell too much on other MMOs, as I don't know if it would get the thread closed. Piestro said not to mention the popular emulation server by name for example.
I tried out AO and DAoC. I forgot about those. I was never big into tradeskills, and after a long day of twisting bard songs in DAoC, I truly did not enjoy having to then sit down and spend more time doing skill ups and gear upkeep. HAha! I missed my Everquest guild too much and that's probably the main reason I didn't last in daoc. As far as AO, I just couldn't get into it at all. As far as what you are doing overall, I appreciate your interest in Everquest and enjoy reading your posts.
