Bringoutyourdead, your comment...

[1974ER]

"Something is odd with your setup... your update numbers have just died as of the 20th. Balgair's and mine haven't shown the same drop in numbers with our updates."

Well, there are several contributing factors:

1) I have been running censuses on a lower number of factions than usual for me since the Pilgrim's Bounty began and spending more time playing specific characters.

2) I have only one account and since I started a new alt a few days ago, my flexibility has been almost eliminated. I am now seriously looking into deleting several of my "permanent" census alts as I will also need more space for goblin / worgen characters after I get my hands on Cataclysm.

3) Also, your 3rd conclusion is faulty... compare Balgair's results from 22nd to her results on the 24th... the drop is close to 10k updates between fairly close days. If, as I heavily suspect, it's related to decisions Rollie made on 24th, we are about to see a massive drop in overall updates... and Balgair can bury her dreams of ever bypassing the records she has set, as they will become impossible to beat unless one can afford to spend time operating 3 or 4+ accounts simultaneously.

As of right now, she has already pushed the monthly new ones to values I did not even believe were possible... and despite the axing of 24th, she already has over 676k updates...

The problem is... the month is almost over and right now... she has 14 unprocessed entries... 837,062 updates is her (and site's) all time record. That means that excluding what she can do today, she needs each of those submissions producing an average of almost 11 500 updates to even tie with her old record.

I am very sorry to say this, but I no longer think she can make it. Around the 20th, when the topic was discussed in another thread, I was still fairly confident she would break her old record with ease.

4) Have you taken a close look at everyone after us three? The big backlog is messing things up... but as far as I can tell, this isn't going to be a particularly good overall month either. In fact, without Balgair's superb efforts, the overall results would be horribly weak.

[Balgair]

Regarding the drop on the 24th... that happened to be patchday, and I happened to spend much of the day playing the game, meaning I was only censusing one account instead of two, and that one not very intensively (I'd tend to forget to tab to it and switch server). The numbers are still significantly lower than I'd expect but then again... pretty much ALL new characters that day would be under 30, which obviously aren't counted now. As the new alts get over 30, or people go back to higher level ones, there'll be more results again.

That said, it does feel like the changes to the database have stuck a dent in the numbers, and I'm pretty sure I won't break that updates record, especially since I've been playing the game a lot this past week instead of censusing! Oh well at least I got a nice record for new ones but a bit disappointing with the amount of work I've done this month, I think it'd be a lot closer without the level limit change from 10 to 30.

[1974ER]

Well Balgair... if Rollie can't find a solution, which is both doable and affordable, the dent is going to be permanent... and fairly big. Compared to previous situation, each individual character will lose up to 20 updates before hitting level 30. Considering the amount new characters that have been created since the 24th and perhaps more importantly all the thousands of goblins and worgens that will be created on the 7th and after... we are speaking of a loss of 1M+ updates before the end of December alone... and that is probably an overtly conservative estimate as it is based on only 50 000 new characters reaching level 30 (or higher) before the end of December on US and EU servers.

If half a million new characters were created and reached level 30+, the theoretical loss would exceed 10M updates. That's an enormous pile of data... :/ And under current rules, it will be permanently and irrevocably lost.

I have no actual idea how many copies of Cataclysm will be sold upon release. All I know is that WotLK sold over 400 copies in less than 10 first hours after its release in the shop where I bought mine... and it wasn't the only shop selling WotLK in my home town. If we apply that figure (400 copies / 200 000 inhabitants) assuming it is fairly representative, we end up with approximately 10000+ copies in Finland alone in the first day alone. With similar ratio, Germans would have bought 164k+ copies, etc... Half a million copies would run out fast at those kinds of rates.

[bringoutyourdead]

It is going to be worse then you thought. Wrath of the Lich King sold 2.8 million copies in the first 24 hours. I expect with the major changes of the old world, the selection of the 2 new races and the pre-release date ability to download the expansion pack, Blizzard will end up announcing that Cataclysm 1st day sales/updates will be at least 1/3 more then WotLK.. or more then 3.7 million. I've talked with a number of WoW players and while a few are going to power up to level 85, most players are going to start Worgan or Goblins in the first few days.

I expect the 2nd and 3rd week of December are going to be very bad for update processing on this site.

[1974ER]

Things are double edged swords... Also, though your data is most interesting... You didn't specify, if the 2.8 million copies was US and EU only... or worldwide? From WCR point of view, non-US/EU sales have zero effect.

And why did I speak of double edged swords, you ask? Well... You just semi-proved that a large number of players will be going goblin / worgen. Do you know what that translates into for the site with current settings? Even larger numbers of data that will be discarded and lost forever. We'll be censusing as we have been before... but now, instead of discarding data up to level 9, we'll be throwing away everything up to level 29.

Which... among other things, will mean that on the 7th, the numbers of new and updated characters will fall, possibly through the floor. Yes, everyone going from 80 to 85 who is seen by a census will be counted, submitted and updated, provided Rollie's official version is ready before the US realms go up... and we will see goblins and worgen reach level 10, 11, 12... 20... 28 and finally 29, for nothing. We'll count them, but at the end of the day, there won't be a trace of them left.

Then, they will start trickling in, slowly, a few there, a few more here as they finally hit level 30... at that point things will start to return back to normal, slowly. The only difference being that these newer characters will have even less of the history than those who were created long ago.

Will it matter? To most people, no. To you? I don't know. To Rollie? No idea there either. To me? Yes. One of the many great things about WCR has to me been the ability to see into the past that I can't see in the Armory. I realise, though, that history doesn't interest everyone. So I am not going to quit censusing or nerdrage...

I will just make a simple plea for something, which I fully well realise I might never get:

Rollie, please find a way to return the cutoff point to level 10 (without wrecking the site or your finances, of course)!

[bringoutyourdead]

The Blizzard news release of 2.8 million was for US/EU. US includes the Oceania and Latin American players (after all the servers for them are in Southern California)[Edit: also Rollie has them in the US lists]. Not sure when Korea got WotLK [edit: about a week later] and as you may remember China didn't get it until August of this year nearly two years after the rest of us.

I thought I remembered seeing a spike in census numbers when WotLK came out but looking back at our the graphs I don't see it. But then both you and I joined on the same day, a week before the release. (Thought I had been doing census runs and uploading uncredited since mid August of that year.)

Looking at Rollie's activity graphs.. the prime time player counts for US&EU servers went from 4.1million for Oct2008 to 4.6million for Nov2008

[pencey]

Rollie, please find a way to return the cutoff point to level 10 (without wrecking the site or your finances, of course)!

Maybe only process odd number levels (11, 13..19...29)? Characters will slip through the cracks, but typically you'll catch them every other time they're on.

[Balgair]

Rollie, please find a way to return the cutoff point to level 10 (without wrecking the site or your finances, of course)!

Maybe only process odd number levels (11, 13..19...29)? Characters will slip through the cracks, but typically you'll catch them every other time they're on.

Now that is a genius idea, if it's easily workable! Would miss a few, sure, but a heck of a lot less, just do every other level up to about 40 or even 50, and that'll have much the same reduction on entires but hopefully miss a lot less. Feeling a bit bad that my awesome troll druid isn't on WCR at all yet, and won't be till I lvl a bit higher in the next few days - usually I claim my character the instant it hits lvl 10!

Obviously can't guarantee it's workable, the hassle of only picking out alternate levels may not be worth it, but if it works, I like it a lot

[1974ER]

More interesting comments, I see. Bringoutyourdead, one fairly important note, the figure is active characters, not active players... and we didn't catch them all, not even by a long shot. The real figures are significantly higher. This is a wellknown and old fact, since many realms have absolutely horrible updates level, around 11-12 censuses per YEAR.

Fascinating idea, yes, but Balgair brings up a good point. Programming that kind of pattern could be a lot more complicated. Also, if it was easily doable, the level pattern would be more useful if it was irregular, for example 10, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29. That way, it would catch the full 10s and many of the twinks.

[Rollie]

That's a really interesting idea. I think for the moment, I'll start with keeping the majors 10, 15, 20, 25 and see about tweaking from there