How many concurrent players does a typical WoW server have?

WoW has a huge playerbase as we know, but how many average players are on a single WoW Realm at once? Is it higher than the average MMO (for example FFXI has 1500+ on a server at once).

EVE Online wouldn't be a good comparison, as that is a single server/world for all players.

Note: By server, I mean "Realm" or the sort and not physical server (as most MMO worlds are made up of multiple servers). I'm looking for sources such as interviews, development phase information, etc.

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3 Answers

It sounds like you're looking for the information from for World of Warcraft. An average of 900 players on across a day, with a peak of around 1500. That's across all realms, so you could dig down into the stats on the page to find out the average for a high population realm, etc.

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I've worked as Mmo journalist and analyst for a few years but i'm not active anymore, so whatever i'm gonna say is outdated by at least 2 years. Probably new games have different limits due to more powerful servers.

For what i know, the smallest WoW server had a cap of 4000 players while the biggest were around 7000-8000. I don't know if they are bigger now.

The biggest server ever was Eve's online server, that used a distributed approach and could afford a peak of 50k concurrent users. Probably they beat that record recently.

The average Theme Park mainstream mmo had the same numbers of WoW, ranging from 2500 to 5000-6000 players. There were exceptions but most of them used the same approach as WoW.

Korean f2p games had usually a lower average player cap, ranging usually from 1000 to 2500. Chinese games, overall those from PerfectWorld Inc. were bigger but i don't remember exactly.

For sandbox games there weren't a good rule, i remember Love that had a maximum of 150 registered players per server. I don't remeber exactly but Darkfall or Mortal claimed to have a really high players' limit, but i'm not really sure.

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I've heard 15000 players on some games, i think it was ultima online that had the highest. Usually it also depends on the architecture. On true open world RPGs you probably have less people than on segmented world architecture (like GuildWars)...

Another point you have to take into account is the difference between a world and a server. WoW has thousands of servers but much less worlds. Same thing for FFXI and FFXIII, they feature zones which may be set on different servers while still in the same world.

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