Global Faction Population Snapshots Over 24 Hours

I picked six times during the course of 24 hours to take a "snapshot" of the server populations. Obviously they fluctuate a lot, but a snapshot at one hour is as good as a snapshot at any other when averaged over all fourteen servers, and taking them at different hours over the course of a 24 hour period gives a fairly good glimpse of real faction balance. (the data was taken from the character creation screen and was gathered each time in the space of about 60 seconds).

Server figures and overall figures stayed, on average, fairly consistent throughout all servers for the whole 24 hours, and were not as varied as you might expect, with just a few spikes here or there.

Full "snapshot figures" for each check I made are below for those that want to go through them, but a TL;DR summary is here:

Total Average Populations Over 24 Hours:
VS: 29.6% global 24 hour average
TR: 33.5% global 24 hour average
NC: 36.8% global 24 hour average

Times Faction Had Lowest or Joint Lowest Population:
VS Lowest Count: 60
TR Lowest Count: 26
NC Lowest Count: 5

Times Faction Had Highest or Joint Highest Population:
VS Highest Count: 7
TR Highest Count: 32
NC Highest Count: 54

It sums up what most people have already felt/noticed.

Actual Snapshots:

4th faction rerolled to NC, I suppose?

Not only is this a good thread, but it highlights problems with the VS population. Thanks for posting, this is quite interesting.

Haha, and people said TR were the new FOTM. Told them they were wrong.

See, NC has the zergiest population but when you look at the numbers of those that actually stay with their faction TR is the highest IIRC. NC just gets the people that play 'til BR 10 and then leave.

yea and it has something to do with the location of WG....thats the numbers NC used to have when they were sitting in the corner of shame...

So.. TR has 4% on VS and NC have about 7%. Where is this catastrophically low VS population I've heard so much about?

Very awesome post, many thanks and props to you for the effort!

If you've got 5,000 people online at once on a server, 1480 are VS, 1675 are TR and 1840 are NC, that's definitely enough to make a big difference.

400 extra troops on the ground at any one moment can make a HUGE difference.

Of course that's just the "global average" - on SOME servers, things swing the other way, or swing to opposite extremes, and on SOME servers, VS seem to be consistently suffering with only 25% pop.

It's not extreme, and it's not as crazy as people on the forums might make out. If anything, these numbers are probably what people kind of expected that were thinking more realistically. I think it just sort of "puts it in stone".

None of us can know what did it - a lot claim the magrider. But I'm with you on this - the NC had the same sort of population when they had the bad Indar warpgate location, and the TR had the same sort of population that the NC now have. The warpgates swapped, and the populations swapped right along with them. To me, it's a sign that Indar needs some serious balancing work (scrap the warpgate rotation, fix the map)... but we can't really know for sure what did it.

It depends. Some servers skew the data by having balanced VS populations, like Briggs or Soltech. But for players on servers like Connery, the VS pop drop is felt quite heavily. The other day I saw it go down to 19%.

And 4% already seems a bit unfair, but 7%? 7% of a global pop is more than 20% of a faction's total pop. That's quite significant. And on servers like Connery, it's more than just a 7% pop advantage over VS most of the time.

So many numbers, what do they all mean? Not a great ******* deal.... having 30% pop isn't such a huge disadvantage, really you Vanu types will moan at any perceived disadvantage. I heard that due to purple's epic skillz that actually they outskill us 2:1 so your way ahead of us in advantage. Buff TR and NC skills to compensate please.

ye i agree with alot you say there...but we cant be 100% sure its the problem but we agree on that alot points towards the map layout..

As much as I want to see more data that shows the VS pop needs fixing, there's a problem with the data in the first post. It only shows data from a SINGLE day. It could very much be a fluke that the VS pop was lower on that day. Really, to get an accurate picture, supported by data that is not flawed, you will need to do what the OP did over an entire week or so. That way, you get an average for every day of the week, which will allow you to see a trend.

Right now, you can't see any trends because you have no idea if the data was a fluke or not. For all we know, most VS players didn't feel like playing that day. What the OP did is like pulling the data at 2 AM and saying that's the dominant trend - it's not.

Good post, thanks for going through and actually getting numbers.

It seems that you saw the film "300" and don't even thougth that this possibly could be fiction???
As in my startet threat I als ohave to facepalm here!

NC/TR whined month over month because of our OP Magrider - the only thing what makes the VS perform good! Now we have nothing outstanding (TR has their ESF and Magsize / NC has it's MAX and hard hitting weapons). What VS have is "no bulletdrop" which is useless because 90% of the fights are CQ

The only thing when VS posters bring some well explaind things up - while before TR/NC cried only nerf,nerf, nerf!!!!11!!, TR/NC trolls came along and leave some of their shiit here!

Well, feast on your new gained OPness and your new fotm title - maybe the next nerf hits you and we will see a lot more whinigthreads of TR and NC here. Back to the old days of Pre GU2

@Scorponok: Like to see that not all of the other factions only troll here

In terms of mathematics/statistics, yes we could argue for at LEAST a week's worth of data, with regular stats updates, at set scheduled times, etc. etc. etc. - but I'm not a mathematician and I also prefer to spend a little less time fiddling with numbers and more shooting faces with a shotgun.

However, I really don't think you're going to see anything much different to what I posted. Here, I've just taken another snapshot, and here's how it looks;

Server Population Snapshot 23:00 GMT (25th Feb):
Briggs: 35 / 29 / 36
Cobalt: 32 / 33 / 35
Woodman: 30 / 34 / 36
Lithcorp: 30 / 30 / 40
Ceres: 30 / 32 / 38
Miller: 29 / 35 / 36
Mallory: 28 / 34 / 38
SolTech: 34 / 31 / 35
Waterson: 27 / 41 / 32
Jaegar: 22 / 41 / 37
Mattherson: 29 / 38 / 33
Genudine: 38 / 27 / 35
Helios: 30 / 31 / 39
Connery: 25 / 37 / 38
VS Pop: 419 / 29.9% average
TR Pop: 473 / 33.8% average
NC Pop: 508 / 36.3% average

And given what most people have already noticed for the last few weeks with their own eyes about the VS pops being lower (whether by just a few percent or more depending on server), I don't think it's going to alter radically from that. Perhaps on the odd occassion you may see the VS global pop peak at about 31%, and probably in turn see it drop to 25% global average at other hours - but the average seems to be sticking at around 29% VS, 33-34% TR, and 36-38% NC.

It's like the NC and TR in this thread seemed to have blocked the memory of them and their factions ENORMOUS tear-fests that were going on pre GU2.

And oh you poor VS souls from jaeger, we're going to have a hell of a time holding onto territory when we're merged.

Nothing new .. All faction's including VS have been doing it since Beta ... More tears than a night at the Oscar's

Focusing on server merges:

Cobalt & LithCorp Average Pops Over 6 Snapshots:
(VS / TR / NC)
Cobalt: 30% / 32.8% / 37.1%
LithCorp: 29.8% / 29.5% / 40.7%
Merged: 29.9% / 31.2% / 38.9%

Genudine & Helios Average Pops Over 6 Snapshots:
(VS / TR / NC)
Genudine: 32.3% / 26.3% / 41.3%
Helios: 31.8% / 32% / 36.1%
Merged: 32% / 29.1% / 38.8%

Mattherson & SolTech Average Pops Over 6 Snapshots:
(VS / TR / NC)
Mattherson: 26.5% / 39.5% / 34%
SolTech: 39.2% / 26.2% / 34.7%
Merged: 32.8% / 32.8% / 34.3%

Ceres & Mallory Average Pops Over 6 Snapshots:
(VS / TR / NC)
Ceres: 30.7% / 34.3% / 35%
Mallory: 26.8% / 39.5% / 33.7%
Merged: 28.8% / 36.9% / 34.3%

Overall I would say the merges will definitely help the servers being merged by a margin, and it looks like SOE really did look at server faction balances when thinking about the merges - Mattherson & SolTech merge looks perfectly matched. But Cobalt and Genudine merged will still see almost 40% NC population, and Cobalt & Ceres (the two European servers in the merges) will still find their VS side understaffed. Still, better than before all-round I think, so am looking forward to the merges (I am on Cobalt)

It makes sense. The Vanu Sovereignty espouses quality over quantity, the New Conglomerate likes quantity over quality, and the Terran Republic is in between. Lore-wise, it is a quite respectable ratio.