More data, more data, more data

The Daedalus Project just dropped me a note to let me know they have more MMO data, articles, and surveys available. One that caught my eye, just because it's so often a topic of discussion on MMO blogs, is 'what do players want?' With a sample size of 500 (but a not necessarily representative sampling), the top ten answers were:

# Quests (9%): More interesting quests. Quests with variable outcomes. Quests that involve trade skills. Quests that drive social interaction. Quests that utilize logic.

# Customization Options (8%): More customization features. Ability to look truly unique. Unique classes or races. Hybrid classes. Unique abilities.

# Solo Content (7%): Soloability and solo content.

# Storylines (6%): More lore and background threads. Interesting stories or plot lines. Active storyline.

# Casual Content (6%): More casual-friendly content. More content for small groups. Low-level content.

# PvP Content (5%): More opportunities for PvP. Well-designed PvP content.

# Crafting / Tradeskills (5%): Robust crafting and economic systems.

# Role-Playing (5%): More support and enforcement for role-playing. Tools for role-playing.

# Community Changes (5%): Regulate farmers. Ways to report people. More mature / honest / civil players.

# Social Tools (5%): Ability to build houses or social spaces. Group transportation. Collective player-created content. Social events tools.

No big surprises. There's also stuff on pets and crafting.

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).