Raid numbers

I'm still trying to collect more reliable data on how many people in World of Warcraft are using the raid content. Seems pretty much impossible. But I did find some hilarious quotes showing how hard it is to count things like these, and how unable Blizzard is to read those numbers right.

This is from the Blizzcon 2005 raid panel notes on Goblinworkshop:

Blizzard take issue with the charge that endgame dungeons are designed for the '1% of the game world that will actually see it.'
...
Worldwide, every weeknight during prime time there are approximately 500 Molten Core instances running (15,000 players), 150 Onyxia instances (2,500 players), 250 Blackwing Lair instances (6,000 players) and 700 Zul'Gurub instances (10,000). On the weekend, there are 800 Molten Core runs being made.

Yeah, they are right, the content is not for 1%, if you sum up those worldwide numbers you get 33,500 players raiding during prime time, which is a lot less than 1%. It's just half a percent of 6.5 million subscribers. I imagine Blizzard thinks that if half a percent of players is in raid instances on any given night, you can multiply this number by 30 to get 15% of players going raiding every month. Unfortunately that isn't true, because it is usually the same people going raiding 5 and more nights per week, so half a percent per day is quite compatible with PlayOn's number of 3.6% per month.

Well, digging a bit deeper on where this focus on raid content is coming from, I found this interview with Jeff Kaplan (whose job title when you google him goes from assistant designer, to senior designer, to lead designer, explaining why early WoW wasn't that raid-centric) on Safehouse (or this mirror). So where does Jeff come from? Quote:

In EQ, I joined a guild called "Legacy of Steel" and eventually became an officer of that guild. Legacy of Steel was the top guild on the server I was playing on and one of the top guilds in the game, serverwide, but we didn't have a Web site. So, the guild leader at the time, Ariel, asked me to start posting Web updates, which I did. However, I soon found that just writing about the guild's most recent kills got boring, so I started branching out into other areas, including writing in-depth design suggestions.

I eventually became Legacy of Steel's guild leader because Ariel was
becoming too busy at work, and during my tenure, I led the guild to a number of server firsts as well as a few serverwide firsts, seconds, and thirds. Ariel would still log in and play occasionally, though, and we would often chat about games. Well, as it turned out, Ariel was Rob Pardo, who is now the vice president of game design at Blizzard.

Oh great, the vice president of game design and the lead game designer of Blizzard have been leading an uber raiding guild in Everquest together, proudly being the first, second or third to kill a particular new raid boss. If every night 0.5% of people are having fun in raids, while the other 99.5% have run out of casual fun things to do, at least we know who to blame.