How can realms be full when literally nobody is on them yet?
This is my opinion. Blizz has idea of what they think their retention rates will be. They are taking that number and determining how many layers they will want to launch with. Based on the quantity of unique accounts that are creating characters on a given server they are showing you the capacity that the server has given the amount of layers they intend to launch with.
Example. If Blizzard thinks that 20% of people who play Classic will stick around for phase 2, and if in phase 2 they decide they want a full pop server to be 10k, they would want to launch with approximately 50k players per server (approx 16-17 layers), with the expectation that these players will naturally decay to one cohesive world of 10k players by phase 2. So they mark servers full at 50k name reserves based on the amount of unique accounts that have created a character on that realm. This means that if you create 1 character or 3 on one realm, you are still only counted as 1 player towards that 50k population. If you create characters on multiple realms, you are counted towards each of those populations. Counting several characters on the same server would be useless as you can only be logged into 1 character, on one account at one time. However, they can not determine which character you will primarily play on if you create it on two separate servers, thus both of your characters are counted towards the realm population.
The issue is that we dont know how big servers are, we dont know what the cap on layers will be (there will be a cap), and we dont definitively know how many people will be on each layer (only an estimate). So the terms "low", "medium" and "full" are relative to what those numbers are. We have some general speculation based on the betas etc, but at this point I would avoid full pop realms at all costs given what we do know. It is very reasonable to assume that players on full pop servers could be waiting upwards of 5-8 hours on launch to get in. This issue could persist for days... weeks or even months.
Of note, the people who paid for access 1 month before the game to reserve names and those who lined up to reserve on day 1 will be far more inclined to play immediately on launch and stay online for extended periods of time. This is your VERY dedicated audience.
Activision/Blizzard didnt predict we wanted classic and created too little servers. I hope they release central and mountain time servers. Were not even 7 days from launch. Open more servers!!
I love that the Herod discord is adamant that they'll stay on the server despite the potential queue times, but knowing the modern gamer, they hate long queue times.
They will eventually admit defeat move to Stalagg :^)
Thanks for that, didn't realise a new server opened eu. Actually got my main name (Fanny) sorted now thanks to that!!