lies, damned lies, and...

WarCry has a post about low population realms in World of Warcraft, which links to a forum post by Drysc on the official forums, who points out that some of the realms people think have low populations actually don't.

Which obviously depends on how you define a low population.

Is it the total characters on the server? The total active characters? What about horde/alliance balance? What about level balance?

Maintaining all of these things, while accounting for massive churn, is a pretty complicated thing - one which I don't think the setup WoW has chosen is necessarily able to effectively address. Or rather, it might be able to address, but only with seriously active intervention, which I don't think we're seeing right now.

Hopefully future games are keeping an eye on this, and figuring out how to deal with it (if they're lucky enough to find themselves in this spot).