WarcraftRealms.com

While the numbers on the census could be wrong due to lack of data recording and what not, I decided to try a more dynamic approach that may give a hint as too how many active connections a realm can handle.

I started with US Arygos, a EST Normal realm. Given the player activity from here I found the active population went from Medium to High around 16:00 (about 13 minutes ago). So I made a couple of alts on both sides, and took a clean census.

Alliance - 1205
Horde - 757

At High that would leave active connections around 2000 or so. But now it stands to reason where is the absolute limit before queues start? And do all realms hold the same number of connections or do they widely vary based on their age, location, regional activity, or even how they've been upgraded over the years.

Arygos stands a good chance of being queued later this evening, but I plan on hitting a Normal realm who will already be locked and queued and take down the queue number and do fresh census there to determine if there's an absolute limit or close to it.

I don't work for WCR.com and I'm doing this out of curiosity, but those active numbers are far lower than any of the projected population counts. Also I will have to go to another locked realm in another timezone to see if it's possible realms hold different numbers of players or if the limit is static.

Keep in mind that the low - medium - high designation is a dynamic one as well, it changes depending on how many people are logged on altogether at a certain point in time. To make it even more difficult to garner viable information from Blizzards own status pages the number before a server is queued also seems to fluctuate depending on things like patch status, hardware status, cluster population level, internal network status, population move qualifiers (lowering the total number of players allowed on a certain server will increase the incentive to move and after moves increasing it will both make people more prone to move but will also reduce and elimiate queues afterwards leading to a "successful" migration.)

The most I have seen is around 2k from all the census's I have run.

I thought at one time blizzard said max capacity was 5k for a server, and something like 10k accounts. I could have dreamed that so don't quote me on it.

The highest I've seen on one side is in the high 2000's, 2800 or so. I believe the 5k concurrent number is what they were expecting to manage, in reality they had a hard time coping with 3-3.5k concurrently at first.

The PvE realms on the EU servers have up until recently been limited to 3700 or so online, recently following the big influx of people with 2.3 and Christmas they've raised the limit on some of the realms to 4200-4300. Pretty much all the PvE realms are now about 3600 minimum peak times.

Interestingly, the busy PvP realms still queue at 3700, even though the queues can get upto 500 or more. Blizzard trying to force people off those servers onto the lesser ones where they're still less than 3000 at peak times?

Pretty underhand if it's true.

Large Group vs Large Group on a scale larger than AV tends to really clobber the realm server they are happening on, to the point of becoming highly unstable and crashing. [/quote]
That's prolly why my server (Arthas) crashes every so often lol
World PvP FTW!