Outnumbered!Follow

Appearantly, alliance outnumber horde when the horde talking, and horde outnumber alliance when the alliance are talking. I've not been to any message board without seeing this; not to mention that this discussion routinely takes place in general chat once a night. Please, someone- no, anyone- point me to where Blizzard has officially released this information. As it stands now, no person in-game can poll both sides of the server. The closest form of this is Cosmos's polls which are GROSSLY misleading. Some of the servers have no population at all on alliance side.

Unless someone has a Blizzard's release on this issue, I say this whining REALLY needs to stop.

Malygos, 14:1 alliance to horde....OUCH!!!!

Wowcensus is horribly inaccurate

That's my point. There is no way players can poll servers to get an accurate population count. People look at sites like Wowcensus.com and think this is accurate. Frankly, it's quite annoying hearing this as an excuse for when raids and such take place. In raids I've been in, there was no noticable difference at all, but people will complain later saying they were outnumbered.

It's kinda sad to see people whining about a 3:1 ratio and calling for Blizzard to limit people joining one side or another when they don't even have an accurate statistics.

There's a negative aspect of letting players know which side "controls" a server; it make prompt players to avoid joining a server that's out of balance. I could imagine that would be very obvious on PvP servers, "I want to be a Dwarf, but the Horde outnumbers us 3 to 1 on this server, I'll start one on the server that has the Alliance on top!"

Not everyone seeks out balance, a lot of "l33t" gamers just want to win and giving them a chance to engineer that could make matters worse for people who just want to play.

Is there a /sea all comand that we can see who is on our server at any time? Is there any way to check this while logged on? I have not found it yet if there is...

Here is the most informed thoughtout post, made by Slappy, I've seen on the subject taken from the official boards:

this is a straight repost froma similar topic in the arthas form
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this information is misleading.

First, the data this site computes total characters, or attempts to. It takes population snapshots, then compares that with what information it has, adds new people if applicable and then updates existing people if applicable.

Flaws in this system is that, if more people are taking horde snapshots (since they have horde characters and thus cannot take an alliance snapshot), then horde side will show more people since they have more snapshots.

While computing a total character population, this is fine. But in no way can this be used to convey an idea of population imbalance. The only way todo this, is to analyze the snapshots individually and not merge them.

What do I mean?

Every time I have run a census and received a snapshot of the current population at that time (for arthas), it has been alliance 60% horde 40% (give or take less than 1%). Now if at noon, 5pm, 10pm and midnight everyday, the alliance has 60% of population: we can safely assume that there is a population imbalance and that the alliance has more people (at least, for the sake arguement, during those "peak" times).
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Now as to computing "total" character population, which this/these sites are trying todo, their accuracy is directly tied to the amount of snapshots, and the variety of said snapshots. If they only snapshot the population on tuesdays at 8pm, their numbers will be skewed. Or for that matter, if they only have had 2 or 3 snapshots, then their numbers will be quite skewed.

However, given a large amount of snapshots, all over varying times, the accuracy of these sites will be more accurate. However, at the moment -- as we can see -- these sites are not very accurate for many servers.