When we published Milestone 1.12, we introduced what we call “Population Incentives.” These effects give bonus loot and experience to nations on each server that we designate as underpopulated. These nations often have substantially fewer players than rival nations, which puts them at a disadvantage in PvP, RvR, and the Economy.

The bonuses accomplish a number of things. First, they provide extra loot and experience, which helps existing players at 50 while also helping new players to level faster. The bonuses also help nations grow stronger economically and enhance RvR efforts and participation.

Second, these bonuses are very attractive to players of rival nations. Getting increased rewards from a PvP kill is extremely useful, and the double XP rate helps people who re-roll get to 50 faster.

The goal with these bonuses is to drive players to even out nation populations. This goal has been largely successful on almost all our servers. Players from populous nations have decided to play new nations and new characters at a very high rate. Unfortunately, this has caused a lot of confusion over what the populations really are and which nations we still consider “underpopulated.”

Most of this confusion is centered around the population levels shown on the Login screen. Very recently, multiple nations were listed at Moderate on the Login screen. Currently, no nations are listed as Moderate, and this has the appearance of population falling rapidly, when that’s not the case.

Here’s a general overview of how we calculate the stats on the Login screen:

• Every 20 seconds, we check to see how many players are logged in to a server, per nation.
• We write these values to a master database.
• Once every 60 seconds, we query this database to get the highest peak concurrency for each nation from the last week.
• We feed this number through some additional logic to show Light, Moderate, etc to clients on the Login screen.

When people from a large nation, say Nation A move to Nation B, then Nation A has fewer people and Nation B has more. This might make Nation A fall below the mark we use to assign levels on the server select screen.
To make this even more clear, here are some examples of what populations look like on the different servers. In the past, most of the servers had a population graph like this:

The colors correspond to the four nations. You can see that two of the nations are what we designate as underpopulated. We give these nations bonuses. After the bonuses, populations look more like this:

When populations even out, the peaks on these graphs may not be as high as they were. This is why all the nations show Light on the Login screen right now. There aren’t fewer people playing, but the populations are more balanced, which creates a better gameplay experience for everyone. And make no mistake; while populations are evening out across nations, they’re also steadily growing overall.

Consequently, we’re ready to update the nations we designate as under populated. Starting in 1.13, this is how the population incentives will be set. Default character creation nations are italicized:

• Antigua – No Nations are underpopulated.
• Blackbeard – France and Spain
• Defiant – All Nations (Spain will receive default character generation)
• Rackham – France and Spain
• Roberts – Spain

These changes will go live with M13, but we’ll continue to monitor population levels on a monthly basis.