Guild Wars 2

just as the title states… I’m curious to know where server populations (medium, high, full, etc) come from in MMORPGs? the company or is there a verifiable 3rd party? I’ve been playing MMOs since EQ and always wondered this.

It’s from the company themselves.

All servers have a limit on how much traffic they can handle (not just for video games, this is why Twitter goes down whenever some famous person is supposed to have died). So they get labelled as full when they hit that limit. I assume high is when they’re about 3/4, medium about 1/2.

How do you think it works?

yeah like danikat says, depends in how is set the game and the world.

if the max ammount of people is 6k, then at 3k will be medium for example, if they(any developer or company) can manipulate or control the access and the status, thats true too, but since that would be for specific reasons, they just let it automatically handled.

I can tell you but I would have to kill you no really.

Population and concurrency are usually a tightly guarded secret as it is a predictor the overall health of the game and revenue generated.

However in this case a lot of it I believe has to do with accounts per server and how anet culls the inactive ones to make room for new/active accounts.

As to how they are verified- very few outside an auditing firm would be granted such access.

In other NCSoft games you could see server capacity by using the bot programs.