I played some WoW this afternoon. My characters are presently in Loch Modan doing the Hunting Lodge quests. Unfortunately, these quests are not designed with server population curves in mind, because they are time based quests and when you're competing with the masses to kill the 6 pigs that spawn in the Loch in 12 minutes, well, that's just not going to happen.
The chart below is a graph of what the server was like at approximately 9:30pm EST today, with around 4 days of server uptime. You can see two distinct humps in the graph. The first massive hump peaks at about level 5. These are likely East Coast characters that were started this evening, or West Coast casual players who started yesterday and just logged on today. The second hump is in the level range of 14 - 20. As the level of players increase, the number of players at that level decreases, as there simply aren't that many players who are able to spend that much time online. I should do some more data collection on the different zones within the game, but from a quick survey of the starting areas reveals that the most impacted zones at present are the human and night elf areas. The dwarf/gnome area is the least popular, but surprisingly mych of the dwarf/gnome population migrate to the human lands instead of transitioning to the teen zone of the dwarf/gnome area -- however, even more surprising is the sheer number of night elf migrants who cross an ocean as well as a level 20+ zone to make it to the human area.
Those massive humps are also designate where you don't want to be.
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