This is actually a little bit of history which I'd like to preserve on the blog.
Back in late January 2009, Blizzard's advertisements were accidentally swapped out with Gold Seller ads. (Links: wow.com, cgenetwork.com, 1up.com)
Other than this one incident, I recall that it happened a few times actually: on BNet Forums, WoW Forums, and the waiting room of Diablo 2.
But in each case, most (if not all) news instances started to "disappear" and people later forgot. It didn't help though that threads were locked, forum entries were deleted, and Blizzard told sites to remove the news either.
So it's difficult finding information on these accidents now and it's something that Blizzard would prefer that you forget. =]
Reading over the forums, you'll see that Blizzard employees and players alike will all insist that "Blizzard has NEVER been breached. They've never been hacked. They have security measures in place that make them foolproof and 100% protected."
(Note: I never understood that logic so I simply chalk it up to "Blizzard Indoctrination". It's funny because if a game developer creates games that melt video cards and are full of bugs, cheats, issues that take years to fix, exploits, and can easily be hacked and exploited.. why would anything else they create be so different?)
Although employees insist that "To this date Blizzard has never been breached", in an earlier post I listed many cases of Blizzard database breaches, how Blizzard employee accounts have been compromised (and used to spread keyloggers on official forums), and other hacking activities. When the Blizzard employee accounts were compromised, Blizzard sent notifications to websites to remove the information ("Reputation Management"). And those were just the breaches that made public headlines! Who really knows how many breaches there have been?
Some of these are just accidents and "glitches" while others are major security breaches.
This has been going on for years, but it's obvious that it has been forgotten by most. That's why preservation is so important. =]
NA/EU Realm Populations
In North America and Europe, realm population information is extremely difficult to come by.
You pretty much have to rely on WarcraftRealm's CensusPlus UI Mod (Link). Right now, for example it's shows a total of 5.5M characters (however, these are characters from Level 10-80 and each account can have a maximum of 50 players across all realms.)
So, you can understand that the numbers aren't that accurate.
Blizzard also doesn't share Realm Population information because of obvious reasons (those details can only hurt them, not help them.) Even the definition of Low, Medium, and High Population realms can change - there's no fixed number as I have stated previously.
Blizzard has even confirmed this to be true. The populations are relative, meaning that they can shift back and forth at any time, depending on the population of other realms and their relation to the servers (Source). Population caps can even be increased/decreased depending on the number of servers being utilized or out of commission.
(Blizzard just confirmed it to be a fact Mr. Blizzard Troll. I guess that's further confirmation that he's just a support agent, and doesn't actually know anything about Blizzard's internal operations.)
China Realm Populations
So to summarize, in NA/EU it's almost impossible to determine census information because Blizzard will not share the information.
But in China, it's operated by NetEase so it's a totally different story! They're completely open to sharing player information on each realm. =]
Census information is pulled straight from the WoW servers by Beijing Network Technology Ltd. (there's no Census UIMod needed on each user's PC), and is publicly available here. Below are the numbers during peak gaming hours on WoW. In this case, there were approx. 790,000 users logged in concurrently.
Alliance: 338300 - Horde: 451655
So basically, a 3:4 ratio which is not bad.
The number of realms in China has also been growing steadily (many new realms launched this year and last), and some Chinese players have noted that many people are now returning in CWOW in anticipation of WOTLK's imminent release.
However, the first thing you'll notice is the incredible imbalances on the realms. I've attached screenshots below.
Some servers have 1200 horde and only 40 Alliance on the server. That's a 1:60 ratio! These drastic differences have also been confirmed by CWOW players.. they'll have thousands of players on one faction, but less than 50 on the other. It's not uncommon at all.
There also doesn't appear to be a lot of realm balancing activities. As you can see, realm A:H ratios are all over the place and most realms operate with one side significantly bigger than another. Because of this, it turns most realms into a PVE (everyone working together on one side) type realm.
To confirm my assumption, I checked with several CWOW players. They said that PVP is not very common in China, and it's mostly PVE. A more recent comment even stated, "even on PVP servers, PVE is much more popular."
As opposed to NA/EU Realms, the CWOW gaming culture seems to favor "Playing Together" rather than "Playing Against Each Other" (on average). There are many realms with a 1:0.01 ratio for example. And that's very accurate information (as hard as it is to believe for US players) and can be confirmed by any Chinese players playing on those realms. Server populations have actually improved quite a bit bit over the past few weeks, which is a good sign for WOTLK. =]
It's all pretty neat actually, and also explains why Guilds and gold PUGs are so huge and why gold farming is more popular and strategies used are almost identical. (For example, rare gold farming strategies that are applicable to NA/EU might not work in China or players probably aren't even aware of them.)
Based on those figures, I have to wonder if the same is true for NA/EU realms? When talking to US players, they often claim that their servers have 1:2, 1:4, or even 1:10 ratios (either they out-number the opposite faction, or vice versa.) They never had any evidence to back up their claims though, since realm population is not shared by Blizzard.
So in an earlier post, I received a troll comment using the standard "Heil Grammatik" technique. He sounded like a typical Blizzard fanboy, so I figured I would check it out.
(Note: it was a single transposition error that didn't actually impact the calculations.. but he didn't test out the math to confirm as he was too busy salivating over his next troll snack.)
But guess what? He was from IRVINE, CA. Blizzard fanboy central. =]
"Anonymous Troll" not so anonymous anymore: ip68-111-72-78.oc.oc.cox.net (68.111.72.78) (As of Aug 27/10 anyways, I'm assuming his IP is dynamic.)
It doesn't stop there. He's a Blizzard employee too!
He uses Firefox at work and at home (on a Windows OS.. ewww) and was reading a limited number of articles from work (which I'm assuming is against their policy - e.g. personal surfing) and the remaining he read from home. Here's a small excerpt from the logs:
That IP (198.74.38.59) is one of Blizzard's external facing IP addresses by the way. =]
His most recent access from work to read the blog was Aug 26 at 7:57:57PM PST.
You know Mr. Troll, just because you're a late night worker (call center/support staff judging by the hours), it doesn't mean you should be goofing off on the internet. There are tons of paying customers that need actual help, but you're too busy surfing the internet and wasting company resources and time.
After he left work for home, that's when he returned to the same webpages and then starting posting random comments. He spent an average of 10-20 seconds (entry and exit) going through every single post on the blog. =]
For some of the more recent posts, however, he spent 45 seconds to 1.5 minutes reading them (he wanted to make sure his more recent troll posts were read for example). I guess he didn't feel safe writing the troll posts from work, as their NOC team would have records. I should note Mr. Troll, that this blog receives other visits from different Blizzard employees too by the way and they will be reading this. Now that they have one of your visit timestamps, you had best watch over your shoulder. =]
Way to represent your business too by the way: steal company time, don't support your customers, then troll webpages. Judging by your access logs and constant refreshes, I can see that you're totally dedicated to your job.. trolling that is, not supporting Blizzard customers.
If you would like to see one his posts and my retort, check out this article and scroll down at the bottom.
His other post was just to tell me to stop pulling numbers out of my *expletive* and to look at Blizzard's Quarterly Reports which are public. The thing is.. those were the numbers I was using. I copy-and-pasted the Quarterly Reports to the various blog posts, and provided links to the public information. Ouch. I guess that's what you get for only skimming over the posts (10-20 seconds per post.)
* UPDATE:
While I was writing up this latest entry, he apparently bombarded the blog (mostly swearing) with even more troll posts. WOW! He sure is pissed too and did NOT appreciate my response at all.
He's going through every single article he can find. Many of his comments have even been cancelled as well (ie, he started typing a new comment, realized a mistake, cancelled it, and then moved onto another blog post.)
I can't wait until he reads this. Tee hee. =]
My friends and I are laughing our asses off over his posts and I have some friends at Blizzard that I'll be sending these to as well. This has been a wonderful day.
* UPDATE:
The Blogspot automated spam filter apparently captured about 1/3 of his comments too. That's really hard to do! His troll posts must have a lot of common phrases and keywords used by spammers. I'm having too much fun.