For each analysis category (e.g. progression, server type) we allocated a server a value of a '1' or a '0' depending on whether they met best interest criteria from the Horde perspective. Each category is described below.
Economy - Each server's auction house was inspected on the Horde side, in Orgrimmar. For comparison's sake the same items were checked for pricing and volume to serve as benchmarks indicative both of the potential for obtaining gear or mats at achievable prices and for making gold by supplying the auction house. Example items were Primordial Saronite, herbs, ores, cloth, leathers, gems, crafted items such as Boots of Impending Death, flasks, enchant scrolls, cut gems, Miscellaneous Mounts, Miscellaneous Pets, Miscellaneous Other (looking for volume and pricing of the items sold from ICC raids conquering Lich King with Deathmourne). On server checks were validated with the Undermine auction history tool.
Progression - The top three servers to have the most guilds in the top 100 progression-based were awarded 1 point. The list was derived by using wowprogress.com and validated using other servers posting similar information. The criteria of progression speaks to the pool of players from which we would be recruiting and to the caliber of the PUGs.
Timezone - Servers with a timezone of CST were awarded one point due to their alignment with our current server's timezone.
Server Type - Servers of a PVE nature were awarded one point as were PVP servers where the Horde population so vastly outnumbered the Alliance population as to render that insignificant. Subjectively, on the Mal'Ganis server, I leveled one character 1 to 80 and saw one Alliance player once - whom did not gank me when he had the chance.
Population - Servers with a strong population base were awarded one point in the interest of ease of finding groups. It was found during the analysis of the servers that servers with low populations have very long 5-man queues and trade chat was filled with requests for LFM that lasted longer periods compared to servers with high populations where 5-man queues were under 5 minutes and raids were filled quickly with LFM requests. This category also looked at the impact of the population in regards to lag or queues to log in to the server. The servers with the highest populations counter-intuitively also had the lowest lag - or rather, no lag - when zoning into Dalaran or Orgrimmar (I suspect that the best hardware is running the servers upon which the best progression guilds make their homes - it may be the case that the guilds that require the least lag in order to optimize being the best in the world moved to low latency servers or it may be that Blizzard makes sure their servers are tuned best with the resources they have available to them; either way, there is no lag in Dalaran on a server with 30,000 people at the same time that there is lag on Alleria with only 9,000 people.)
Ratio Alliance to Horde - Server population alone is not a sufficient indicator without taking into account how many of those on the server are Horde. Additionally, this factor comes into play with Server Type where it was found that Mal'Ganis despite being a PVP server, has such a lopsided 1:11.8 ratio that for all intents and purposes it is akin to a PVE server.
CONCLUSION - While there were some surprises (the servers with the best PVE progression are actually of the Server Type PVP), based on the criteria, Mal'Ganis is clearly the leader in suggested realm for our Horde toons.
No comments:
Post a Comment