This week's question for you, our readers, comes from an anonymous asker. He wants to know what the best option is for a widespread problem in this time of high realm populations and camped quests aplenty:

There's been a lot of talk on your blog about people ninjaing spawns but I'm not entirely sure that it's as cut and dried as that. Consider this: I was in the Borean Tundra and had to kill the mob on the island that's up the top of the steps. when I arrived there were around 10 other 'toons all waiting around. I had no idea who was there first, who might be grouped, or anything else about them. The first thing I did was /s 'group?', at which point someone invited me, and I grouped with them. Second time it spawned one of us tagged it, I looted, disbanded the group and left. Did I ninja it? If so, how was I supposed to have acted? With new people coming all the time, no knowledge of who had been there longest and no visible queueing system I'm not sure how else to behave. Thoughts?

A little more analysis after the break, and don't forget to post your own answer in the comments below. If you've got a question for our readers, send it to ask@wowinsider.com, and we'll ask it for you.

Previously on Ask WoW Insider...

Here's our first analysis of Wrath sales (actually second, if you count Mike Morhaime's take on the subject): someone thinks it's going to sell big. Gamasutra reports that Mike Hickey of Janco Partners is predicting sales of five million copies for Wrath's first month in stores, which would basically make it the most popular expansion pack of all time. Burning Crusade, a pack that just barely beat out The Sims, sold 2.4 million copies in the first 24 hours, and 3.5 million within the first month, and so Hickey is looking at a little less than double that for the Northrend expansion.

Huge numbers indeed, and yet they don't seem that surprising -- WoW's population has grown since Burning Crusade was released for sure, and while pretty much everyone agrees that not all players will be buying the expansion right away (our own informal poll has about 13% of our readers waiting, not to mention all of the players in other markets around the world), but if even 1/4 of WoW's 11 million players decide to pick up the game on launch, we're still looking at 2.75 million copies, more than BC.

No matter what, Blizzard will make a lot of money, and very likely break all records anyway next week. Wrath of the Lich King will be huge.

[via BigDownload]

Thundgot over on the EU forums says there's a pretty drastic solution incoming to the busy servers incoming: Blizzard is going to offer free server transfers from high pop servers to low pop, so if you've really been driven nuts by all the queues and lag lately, this might be just what you need. On the other hand, don't jump into anything too quickly -- traffic problems are pretty common, especially when big patches (and, you know, expansions) come down, and odds are that once the expansion actually releases, things will die back down after a little while.

Of course, if you just don't want to wait, and don't have any particular ties to the server you happen to be on, then by all means, keep an eye out for the transfers. We're not quite sure which servers will be affected yet, but We Hate PUGs saw Quel'thelas on the list already along with a long list of high pop realms, so while we'll probably see more servers added to the low pop side, the high pop side there now is probably a fairly good indicator of the realms Blizzard sees as trouble. If you're on one of those realms and ready to transfer, sit tight and wait for the announcement today, help is on the way.

A little while back the gamerDNA blog did a nice breakdown of how WAR classes correlate with how gamers do on the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, a widely used test that can break down exactly what type of player you are (Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, or Killer). It was such an interesting writeup that I hoped they'd do it with WoW classes, and apparently I wasn't the only one -- they've got a new post up now examining which classes in Azeroth align with which types of players.

They throw gender into the mix as well -- turns out that while the classes have generally the same percentage of players (not surprising, given that gameplay dictates the classes should be fairly balanced), things start to break up when you add gender to the mix. Priests and Warriors seem to have the biggest separation: according to their data (obtained via the profiles on their site), most Priests are played by females, and most Warriors are played by men. Paladins as well tend to be male, though not as much as Warriors, and Druids tend to be female, though not as much as Priests. Women also tend to prefer the elven races (Blood and Night), while guys apparently prefer Orcs and Dwarves (which helps my -- sexist, I admit -- theory from way back on the WoW Insider Show that the Dwarven starting area appeals to guys more than women).

The Bartle breakdown is interesting, too -- Killers prefer Rogues (duh), Warriors tend to be Achievers, and Hunters have the slight Explorer edge, but in general, the classes have a fairly even distribution across the board. All of the different roles can be filled by all the classes, which speaks to the way Blizzard has built the classes -- you can really solo, PvP, or group up with any of them. WAR's differences were distinct, but in WoW, Blizzard has done their best to make it so that whatever Bartle type you are, you can log in with any class and do what you want. gamerDNA promises more research here (including a Horde and Alliance breakdown), and we can't wait to see it.

At least one person who claims to be in the know believes that WoW ain't done yet: Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, believes that by the end of 2009, World of Warcraft will have picked up at least another million players around the world, in addition to the 10.9 million he says are already in the game. The launch of Wrath of the Lich King and the surge in popularity of the game in China will bring the game up to as much as 12 million players before the end of 2009.

There's no question that WoW's population has slowed down lately -- the last time we heard an official update from Blizzard was way back in January, and while this analyst claims there are more nowadays, there's no question that things have plateaued for the moment. But maybe there are some more folks out there who haven't played yet, and maybe Wrath of the Lich King will bring them into the fold.

He also mentions Warhammer Online, as you might expect (isn't that pretty much a requirement anytime you talk about MMO populations these days?), but he's landed on the same conclusion both Blizzard, Mythic, and all of their players have already ended up at: WAR isn't really going to affect what WoW does, and vice versa. "Core WoW users," apparently, have "limited interest" in the other big MMO out there at the moment.

A Dwarf Priest has a nice long post up about the relationship between Blizzard and one of the more hidden (and yet surprisingly large) groups within their population: disabled gamers. It's no secret to anyone who's played WoW for a while that a lot of disabled gamers have found a lot of solace in a social game where you can be almost completely anonymous and play a character at whatever pace you want to play. Even if you go with the lowest of estimations, there are about 525,000 people playing the game with some kind of disability in real life. That's a much bigger number than I expected, and it's a significant number of people paying Blizzard every month.

Fortunately, Dwarf Priest found that accessibility is relatively good in Blizzard's game -- most of the work is actually done with third-party addons, but the UI and display is so customizable that even with the default interface, many people without a full range of controls or movement can figure out how to play the game. For their part, Blizzard has agreed that a customizable UI is the best way to make a game accessible -- J. Allen Brack says that's a priority in this interview with Able Gamers.

Dwarf Priest has lots more, including a quick comparison with accessibility in Warhammer Online, and even a weird wrinkle in the Glider lawsuit (the botting program's creators are apparently claiming it helps disabled players play their characters). It's a very well-written post about a subject that doesn't get covered much, and there's lots of extra reading to dig into at the bottom as well.

Clive Thompson is probably my favorite technology writer -- I really enjoy everything he writes (lots of his stuff appears regularly in Wired), and he's got a real talent for not only tracking technological trends, but then explaining them in a way that's interesting and easy to understand. So I was pretty excited to see that he's back playing WoW, and just like a few of us here at WI, he enjoys the regular grind of it all.

I don't know whether it's a result of all the Wrath beta news coming out lately, but it seems to me that we're already experiencing a resurgence of players around the expansion. Burning Crusade brought a lot of players back to the game, and it seems like things have started early for the next expansion -- people are returning to level their alts, get their epic mount dailies done, level up their professions, and just generally get back into the mix of things.

And Thompson's piece is really about grinding -- like "obedient workers in a Soviet collective," he says, we return to mindlessly killing boars, or ravagers, or Ethereals, or whatever else it is we need to hit that next level of experience or reputation or profession. Why? Because we're rewarded for it. Increasingly, we live in a world where time invested doesn't always equal reward returned. But while grinding in a game like WoW, it always, always does, and that's why we love it so much.

Gamers on the Street logs onto U.S. servers to get the word from the front on what's going on in and around the World of Warcraft.

This week there was only one choice for where to go and interview players -- the Oceanic realm of Thaurissan has been at the center of realm population issues in the last week, as Blizzard opened up transfers from PvE to PvP realms for the first time ever. I rolled a Dwarf on the Alliance side (where Horde reportedly outnumbers players at huge ratios) to see what things were like and if I could find some people with opinions on the transfers.

Things seem to be better than they were before at first glance -- we'd heard reports that only double digits of people were playing during even prime time, but when I logged on (about 6AM server time), there were quite a few people in the /who list. Ironforge was far from bustling, but I saw groups running around the Isle of Quel'danas, as well as running Magisters' Terrace.

This is old news really: we all know that there are 10 million of us playing Blizzard's MMORPG juggernaut. In MMOGChart's latest report however, there appears to be a little growth spurt in the early part of this year.

This is surprising when we consider the fact that WoW is three years old. In the video and computer game business, three years is considered "old", even for a game that is constantly updated. Other games would usually see a tapering off in terms of population growth at this stage. Not only is market-dominating WoW bucking the trend, it's actually enjoying a surge in its population!

Is this growth spike the result of anticipation for Wrath of the Lich King? Probably so, according to MMOGChart: "There appears to be a slight acceleration of growth a month or two before the release of an expansion, which then continues for approximately 3-6 months afterwards." With the unprecedented size of WoW's playerbase, we can probably expect the hype to be built up a lot sooner than "a month or two".

The report has gone on to break down WoW's existing 10 million subscribers by territory:

• North America: 2.5 million
• Europe: 2 million
• Asia: 5.5 million (primarily China)

Do you read your realm forums? Simple question, eh? Personally, I make sure I at least take a look at my realm forums once a day, even if I don't post.

Admittedly, realm forums are quite often just a pile of drama. Who cybered who, who ninja'd from who, who ganked who. Blah blah blah. Hidden behind all of that, though, there is usually a lot of helpful information. Patch note discussions, recruitment notices, maybe even server progression lists or charts of who on the server has rare crafting recipes.

I've been amazed a few times by people that desperately search for raiding guilds to join on the server, but have not once looked at the official realm boards to see who is even recruiting. Plus, as an officer in a raiding guild, it's just a little bothersome to find out there are so many people that may have been interested in that open spot you had for two months, you just had no way to reach them or know about them.

I've been under the impression that most people who play more than a few hours a week read their realm boards, but I'm not so sure that's the case. That would be a lot of people, when you think about it. So what about you guys? Do you read? Do you post?

Believe it or not, World of Warcraft is the most popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying game in the world! Our super blogger Mike Schramm shared this report over our sister site, Massively. It probably comes as no surprise that WoW is topping the chart. There are more active accounts on WoW than all of the competition combined.

I didn't know there were quite so many MMORPGs active on the gaming market. WoW is unique among this video game genre because of it's continued growth. The player base for other games have leveled or tapered off. I couldn't even guess where the population will top out. With the popularity of the Burning Crusade and anticipation of Wrath of the Lich King, I would not be surprised to see more than fifteen million WoW players.

In a forum post about the ultimate downfall of WoW, Drysc pops in to explain that WoW still has a long lifespan ahead of it. People who say that the lack of new servers proves there are fewer and fewer new players in the game are missing the big picture. Back before The Burning Crusade was launched, Blizzard did a series of server upgrades that left each realm down for a few days. At the time, they said this was to make things ready for the expansion, but little did we know it would be to such an extent.

Apparently these upgrades allowed Blizzard to keep pushing the maximum realm population up all this time, as more and more players joined the game. There are some relatively "low" population realms, of course, but only in comparison to the new much-increased maximum limit. As Drysc says, "aside from literally a handful of realms (I could count them on one hand), every other realm has a population that would have been considered high to overpopulated before the launch of Burning Crusade." Only recently have certain realms become truly crowded enough to merit free transfers to other realms.

People always like to talk about the eventual downfall of the strongest player in any arena, but the steady growth Drysc is talking about continues, it looks like WoW will be the biggest 800-pound gorilla in the MMO jungle for a good long time to come.

Blizzard's publisher Vivendi is rolling in the cash-- they just announced their their quarter videogame numbers, and they're up a whopping 19%. They claim that World in Conflict gave them a nice boost, but c'mon, do you know anyone who's played World in Conflict? Didn't think so.

No, the boost came from our favorite game, World of Warcraft-- Blizzard raised their subscriber numbers by just under a third of a million, making their population now 9.3 million, a raise of over a million in the past year. Burning Crusade's release in China definitely helped, too, and Vivendi's games division raked in $315.2 million.

Now, far be it from us to call a number like 9.3 million "disappointing," but it doesn't seem like WoW will hit that 10 million mark we all expected in 2007. Then again, patch 2.3 could bring a lot of folks back to the game-- is there a chance that .7 million people will sign back in, or will we have to wait for the next expansion to see a big boost?

[Via Massively]

Well he doesn't think he's news, but since we reported on his exit way back when, we might as well bring the whole story full circle, and report on Tobold's return to World of Warcraft. Patch 2.3 (and the Scroll of Resurrection deal-- which is a great one, I don't blame him for filling out a form to get 40 days free) is bringing him back as, he says, a casual player only.

Now of course, the story's not really about Tobold-- with apologies to him for the unwanted attention we sent, it never was (so leave the guy alone, already-- if you've got comments about his decisions, leave them over here). But he is a big, influential MMO blogger, and his leaving WoW was part of a trend back then. In the dark days before 2.2, progress on the realms was stagnant, and there was nothing new to keep folks interested. Even with patch 2.2, voice chat wasn't a big draw for players (and in fact, now that I think about it, I haven't used it at all since it debuted-- my guild is still on Ventrilo, and no one has invited me to use the voice chat system).

But now we're at patch 2.3, and the times, they are a-changin'. There's new midlevel content (!), Engineers have a purpose in life, Hunters have no dead zone, and there's a brand new 10-man instance in the game (almost guaranteed to quickly become the most popular endgame instance out there). Tobold's back, and, just as before, we've got to wonder if he's part of an early trend. Are all the players who took a break this summer coming back to Azeroth?

Okoloth has dropped an update to his Armory analysis, featuring the latest and greatest information on about half of the World of Warcraft's denizens. He surveyed 4.6 million characters on the Armory, and while that sounds like a lot (it sounds like half of WoW's population, except that Blizzard's 9 million figure is supposed to be players, not characters), it's not actually that much of a representative sample. Still, compared to the table scraps that Blizzard gives us, it's something, so let's get what we can from it.

He finds that the biggest majority of players are at level 70 compared to the other levels, but there are still only about 40% of the characters there (adding fuel to the fire on both sides of creating midlevel and endgame content). Mages and Warriors are the standouts on the class breakdown at level 70 (with 13.5% and 14.3% respectively-- what tank problem?), while Shaman are the biggest losers-- only about 7% of level 70s he surveyed were Shaman. Sounds about right. Across all levels, Warriors still have the biggest percentage, while Hunters follow them up. And on the low end, it's Druids, Pallys, and at rock bottom, Shamans. People just don't like playing the totem class.

He's also got new stats on realm balance, but remember that these numbers are not much more than guesses. They're pretty close, though, even for that. Drysc told us that Agamaggan's Alliance/Horde balance was about 1.1:1, and Oko's figures have it at about 1.09:1 (by my math), which is pretty darn close. Big ups to Oko for putting these numbers together, always interesting to see the figures on how and where people are playing in Azeroth.

[ via WoR ]