Guild Wars 2

So I’m absolutely loving this game, but I’m wondering if I hopped on the wrong server (Borlis Pass). I have a friend there, and it said “High” on the server traffic at the time, but I find I only rarely see other people, even in starting zones. I find I’m completing most events by myself at this point, and only rarely see people in passing. I also rarely hear anyone on /s or /m besides in areas with Dungeons (where everything is lfg or lfm). To be fair, I haven’t hit endgame yet (only level 58), so there might be a billion people in Orr, but I’m getting rather tired of not seeing anyone on.

So my question is this: Is there a place where I could check the population (in terms of total number of characters or accounts) on the various servers? That way I could see if my server is really a ghost town or if I’m just looking hard enough. If it is empty, I would love to transfer to a higher-population server.

As a reference point, at what I would consider “peak” time for the game, I might see 10 or so unique characters in a starting zone (not counting bots, which I may or not see) in 1 hour. Perhaps 15 total over 2 hours. This number goes down significantly if I go to the areas more “my” level, to maybe seeing 2-5. I just want to know if this is normal across all servers, or if it is just my server.

No. There is not. It’s rare that companies do this, because then it instills fear into the playerbase that the game is dying, when it’s really not. Almost all servers are Full or High population, except Kaineg, which is always Medium. A-Net raised the population threshold after launch though, but we don’t know if they left it the same or lowered it, since it’s been over a month now.

Thanks for the reply. That makes a lot of sense.

games dying anyhow and has been for weeks.

Best bet is to log in on a peek time for zones to see whats populated and what isnt.

We can expect to see how many accounts there are as that info pertains to investors so we can get a general idea of how many people are playing the game. But unless they release concurrency numbers we won’t really know how many are online at the same time. The best you can do is find out what the peak hours of a server is and see if they match up with your play times. If not change servers. We know there are at least 2 million playing since that is so far the only number public so far. You can extrapolate concurrency based on average concurrency for MMO games of that size. That doesn’t really help if your play time doesn’t match up well with the concurrency though.

When they have to report to stock holders, ncsoft will just talk about how many games sold, not how many people are currently playing since there are no subs.

They might talk about how much money their cash shop makes though.

Copies sold or number of accounts is the same thing since no account would exist that wasn’t a copy sold. Player concurrency on the other hand you would be correct is mostly meaningless to stock holders. But with GW1 the number of accounts was part of the financial release of info for stock holders. And we can probably expect sales amounts for gems as well. Generally speaking the number of accounts wasn’t too far off from the actual active player count with GW1. I remember about 3 years after release wondering how many were actually playing the game. Around that time a respected and trusted research company obtained non-public information for MMOs including GW even though arenanet and many gamers considered it to not be for at least one reason. Even though it fit the definition of MMO. But anyways, their ranking put the number of active players at roughly the same amount as the total accounts to date. So while that may not be the total active player count we can expect that it would be close enough as long as people continue to buy the game and new and interesting fun content is there for existing players to do.

Just go to options. Population should be on the bottom of the interface along with your fps.

@Nexxe -

Actually that’s exactly why companies don’t show population. “even though it’s not” is only a copout. Bottom line is this.

Only about 200-300 per server, pop is dropping everyday.

I you use your eyeballs you’ll see the absence of players.

FYI – the large amount of NPCs that are available to chat with aren’t counted as population as they didn’t purchase a copy of GW2, they’re technically employees of ANet.

If everyone knew the exact numbers, everyone would be screaming (like I have been) for a server merge to have a multiplayer MMO.

Considering you have the capability to transfer servers pop drop should not be a problem. The pop drop could simply be level area drops (because everyone is leveling out of them). Lets forget about players who log in straight to sPvP. I have yet to see an empty server just low to mid level areas with less players that’s about it. PvP still has ques on my server and some zones still get flooded. This doom and gloom is not only premature its irrational.

For Faux Sake.8457:

Just go to options. Population should be on the bottom of the interface along with your fps.

Oh nice! I never knew this.

Krighton.2138:

@Nexxe -

Actually that’s exactly why companies don’t show population. “even though it’s not” is only a copout. Bottom line is this.

Only about 200-300 per server, pop is dropping everyday.

I you use your eyeballs you’ll see the absence of players.

FYI – the large amount of NPCs that are available to chat with aren’t counted as population as they didn’t purchase a copy of GW2, they’re technically employees of ANet.

If everyone knew the exact numbers, everyone would be screaming (like I have been) for a server merge to have a multiplayer MMO.

That’s an exaggeration! Darkhaven has 15,000+.

Hmm. That number might be the GW2 version, and not population.

With only about month from release there is no way total population is dropping. I’d be curious to know what the number in the settings panel is but I doubt it is any sort of population number. Unless a dev tells us otherwise. For a game with as many players as has been reported so far for GW2 there would be an estimated over 200,000 concurrent users. Hard so say how to weight that for each server.