How many players was there on a vanilla World of Warcraft server?

How many players was there on a vanilla World of Warcraft server? This is a question that keeps appearing on World of Warcraft forums, with a lot of different answers and no consensus. In this article I hope to help bring some clarity.

Why players ask this question

Players ask this question for a variety of reasons but most often I believe they ask it to reduce their doubts and fears. They probably don't care that much about the actual number. What they want is enough trust and confidence to start on a server. And to get that they need access to information to alter their beliefs. They want to know if the server is "healthy", if it is of "quality/good enough/trustful" or "sustainable" and get some comparison points or references. Many probably do not know how to evaluate a private WoW server and thus rely on intuitive and simplified judgements (what psychologists call heuristics) based on the answers they get to this question. For example one could think that 0 players online is bad (the server is probably dead or of low quality), 100,000 is too much and anything in-between is a grey "I don't know" area. Without a reference to compare with they get stuck.

Why this question is difficult

This question is difficult for many reasons.

The first problem is definitions, one would have to define what they mean by "players". Is a guy that creates an account a player even if he never connects with it? Is the guy that gets a character to level 20 over a month and never comes back still a player? Maybe then it is better to go with "active player", but what is an "active player"? Are you active if you go fishing for 5 minutes every day on your WoW character? Are you active if you log to read World Chat? Would then "accounts" be better? But what about those that are never used or that haven't been used in months? And players can have many different accounts. And server owners can manipulate those numbers with bots or by creating blank accounts. Perhaps "population" then? But what does it mean? Is that the number of characters seen online since the launch of the server? After a month? Only characters level 5 or higher seen online after a week? Peak amount of characters on saturdays, on average? On what server then? It is impossible to answer all those questions but fortunately we still have some tools left from 2006. Notably, one of the most reliable ways to get information on player numbers on a server was by using the Census addon. This was used by players back in vanilla to upload data on Warcraftrealms and allows us to know how many characters level 10+ were seen online by players using the Census addon during the last 30 days. If we want to compare numbers then this is probably the best one and that is what I will call "population".

Definitions is not the only issue though, there is much more to it. What was "healthy" population or game in 2006 might no longer be in 2016, players have grown, min-maxing is now an expected behaviour, gaming habits changed, access to computers is now easier, there are much more other MMOs or games to chose, most players already know the game well, the processing powers of computers and datacenters is much stronger than before, vanilla guides can be found everywhere, etc.

Server populations during Classic World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft servers in 2004-2006 allowed anywhere from 0-30,000 characters level 10+ to log into the game over a 30 days period. On average servers had around 20,000 characters level 10+ seen online over a 30 days period to be considered full. Those numbers are likely due to server limits of the time. Here are my sources for those claims :

Design decisions also reflect the need to keep players happy. While each gamespace could conceivably handle 20,000 simultaneous players, Mythic limits them to about 4,000 players each, adding new gamespaces when necessary instead of increasing the load on the ones already up. "If you have too many people, the worlds get too crowded," says Denton. "The last thing you want is to be bumping into thousands of people." [Mythic (DaoC) interview, 2003]

In order to break down the game’s large subscriber base into more manageable units, players must choose a specific server to play on. Each server can host a community of about 20,000 players (there are 107 servers available in the U.S.). Three server types are available. The most common is PvE (player versus environment) where players cannot kill other players by default, unlike PvP (player-versusplayer) servers. The third server type is RP (role-playing for players who prefer to “stay in character” during the game. [ Ducheneaut, N., Yee, N., Nickell, E., & Moore, R. J. (2006). “Alone together?” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’06. doi:10.1145/1124772.1124834 ]

A WoW "server" consists of a server farm. That is, dozens of servers operating together with load-balancing to support around 3000 players peak. Each server farm requires placement in a data centre with 24/7 support and uptime. It's not economical to house just one WoW server farm, which is why our current ones are all housed together in the USA. A peak population of around 3000 players generally means a server population of 20,000 players. That's because at any given time, even peak hour, most players are not online. All the hardcore players are online every night, but your general casual person making up most of the 20,000 is not. I may be wrong - more like 15,000 total population per busy server if I divide the copies sold by the number of servers. The 20,000 estimate comes from EverQuest 1 and other games of the period. But that's still a lot of players, and you're still talking about the costs of housing one server farm alone on the wrong side of the world. [May 2005, Australian internet news forum discussion]

Over 30 days, amount of different characters over level 10 seen (exluding servers with low amount of snapshots = red) : 

29,000 (Argent Dawn) Highest
19,000 (Dunemaul) Average
9600 (Anetheron), server opened 6 days before  snapshot
7600 (Muradin), server opened 13 days before snapshot
7600 (Duskwood), server opened 7 days before snapshot
3300 (Steamwheedle Cartel) Lowest, server opened 7 days before snapshot

[Warcraft Realms, Census data from players, 28th March 2006]

If Blizzard had to open more servers, it is likely that this is because current servers were getting too close to their maximum amounts on average. This Warcraftrealms snapshot shows an average of 19,000 characters on each realm, over 30 days, which further supports the idea of about 20,000 players on a server.

Further thoughts

Does knowing those numbers help the players asking for them? I believe not, as it doesn't tell if the server is "healthy" or if it is "sustainable" or even if it is "trustful". Those are only numbers after all. Now, for some to know if a server is "healthy" means knowing how many battlegrounds happen each week, this doesn't tell them that. Those numbers don't tell if the mechanics in the game are working correctly, they don't tell if players are nice and friendly, they don't tell if the server keeps crashing every hour or if it will end in a day due to lack of leadership. All they know is if some server has a population close to what there used to be in vanilla World of Warcraft. There are still players on the Rebirth server, yet it has a much lower population than 20,000, and they stick to it and say they have fun. There were many more players and population on Nostalrius (which unfortunately will be closing on the 10th April 2016), and they sticked to it and said they had fun. Numbers are only numbers.

I believe it is time to go with other, more meaningful questions.

[Other articles about vanilla WoW]