What is the Magic Population Number?

[johnm81]

This is a question I have had for a long time. When it comes to population on a server what is the "right" number? Of course this is a matter of opinion so what is yours? 

For WC of course the number is 70/70. For them it justifies bandwidth costs. But for the community and human nature it the answer can be very different. I am currently on small tribe servers where servers seem at or near max pop all the time. But is this the best condition for this games environment? I find that at max pop servers lag is bad enough for establish tribes to be openly aggressive to new players to drive them away thus pushing pop down and reducing lag.

Human psyche has a big roll to play here. Are players more aggressive when they are packed in? Would the same people be more friendly if spread out with more resources?

[Weiss]

I'm on pve, and 10-20 is what I like most.

You actually meet other players, have people to chat with, but it's not too crowded for people to get in each other's way while taming/farming. 

[Okkor]

I second that, 10-20 other players on pve, assuming they are active and social.

[Corrigan]

2 hours ago, Okkor said:

I second that, 10-20 other players on pve, assuming they are active and social.

I second this. Less likely the server is to be tame capped too, unless it averages 10-15 simply because it's tame capped. 

[OttoGrunf]

for me, minimum of thriving community is 3-4 tribes or 10/70 people online. but maximum is like 30/70 as over that maps are overcrowded including ragnarok

[NateTheDemiGod]

pve 20's usually

[ImPancho]

Around 2 seems to be the sweet spot for me

[MandaBear]

When we were in charge of our server we would strive to have enough tribes active to have 20-30 online at a time. This was a healthy number and meant that both pve and pvp were going on at the same time. This also meant that the community was not overly toxic, and people felt like they had a chance to actually play the game properly even though it was a pvp server. Granted, we didn't want to wipe the tribes after it hit that point and usually tried to not do it. However, when the number got above that point there would always be that one tribe that would get overly aggressive to everyone but us because "lol pvp bruh". We would wipe them and usually 2 other tribes that were always quietly allied with them too, listen to them complain about us being power hungry ***** alphas who are killing the server, then move on with life not caring.