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August 21, 2006

Hours of the Day (by Zone Type)

After mapping out the overall server population by hour of the day, we split the analysis by zone type. Note that our census bot performs the snapshot independently for Alliance and Horde, so the "average server population" listed in the graphs below is roughly half of the true server population.

We split instances into two groups - high-end raid instances such as MC, ZG, BWL, AQ etc. and then non-raid instances which included all other instances. Both UBRS and LBRS were in the lower tier.

The graph makes intuitive sense. The zones that fluctuate the most in terms of population throughout the day are PvP Battlegrounds and high-end raid instances. In particular, we see that players are in high-end instances mostly between 4pm and 10pm.

A plot of the normalized populations shows that the fluctuation of population in raid zones is the only one that significantly deviates from the normal pattern of fluctuation.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of January
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character in each hour of the day.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 179,003 characters

Posted by nickyee at 12:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 07, 2006

Hours of the Day (Basic)

We started looking at server populations at different hours of the day again. For this, we counted each unique character seen in each hour of the day over the month of January 2006. Note that our census bot performs the snapshot independently for Alliance and Horde, so the "average server population" listed in the graphs below is roughly half of the true server population. This month-long analysis is a more accurate portrayal than our earlier one-week analysis:

What the graph shows is that between 4am and 7pm, the increase per hour on servers is roughly linear. We were expecting a much sharper increase in the evening hours, but we see this more in the sharp drop-off than any sharp gain.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of January
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character in each hour of the day.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 179,003 characters

Posted by nickyee at 01:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack