The unofficial numbers for the distribution of players across the individual German World of Warcraft servers paint a completely different picture of the load.
On wowprogress, one can roughly read from a table how players distributed themselves across the individual German servers at the beginning of August and which faction they belong to. Wowprogress counts only one character per account and only if that character has defeated a raid boss in the Battle for Orgrimmar (at least on normal difficulty) or has a level 90 in a guild that has recorded raid progress. So these are not official numbers, but they are likely to be very close to reality.
Of the eight largest German servers, seven have tipped
This results in a surprising picture of a divided server landscape. Of the eight largest German servers, a total of seven have “tipped”. This means one faction is dominant there, while the other is vastly inferior, almost non-existent on some servers.
Tipped towards the Horde are: Blackhand, Blackrock, Eredar, Thrall, and Frostwolf.
Tipped towards the Alliance are: Antonidas and Aegwynn.
The only balanced server with more than 10,000 registered raid chars is Blackmoore.
What is surprising is that even “PvE” servers have tipped in one direction or the other. Many of them have been in this situation for years. It also stands out that among the most popular servers, five belong to those that are found at the beginning of the alphabet, thus at the very top of the server list. A trend that is confirmed in many MMOs.
The 25 smallest WoW servers fit into the largest
Another interesting statistic that shows the difference between “prosperous” and “empty” servers: According to the list, the raid population of the 25 smallest servers, when combined, is still below that of Blackhand, the largest German server.
Mein MMO thinks: It would be an interesting experiment to see how WoW would have developed without realm pools and character transfers – we will probably never know without a parallel world. Blizzard has chosen to solve the problems associated with the severe imbalance in player distribution differently than through direct server consolidation or any attempts to balance the imbalance. They work with realm pools, cross-realm play, and connected servers. Now they are planning for the next expansion that the Horde and Alliance will share an auction house. This should help players on the empty side of a tipped server, provided they are still on the realm by then and have not long since been transferred at a cost.
