WoW on the server end side is nothing more than a huge database (or sets of databases perhaps) and as such you can fairly easily make a query to return any set of data that you'd like to know. It's not really a matter of "how" they do it, since it's just a simple DB query, or an advanced DB query if they want to do something fancy.

If they wanted, they could tell us how many players on all realms right now are using a particular item (as seen on the armory more or less), how many people ganked someone in the last hour (and lets say ganking only occurs when you're at a 30+ level difference from your victim) and how many people are chatting in the Barrens on all servers around the world right now. It's pretty academic really, all you need to know is how to structure a good database query. (making it pretty with a good frontend and a nice website to go with it... hey that's what people get paid a good chunk of money for).

I think the problem Blizzard has, is that they don't specify what timezone these realms are supposed to support, either officially or unofficially, and they probably don't want to since they'd rather have anemic spread out populations most of the time, rather than %90 of the people who have characters on the server being logged on at the same time. What people WANT is the peak population on at the same time they are, so they can find people to do things with for the most part. I'm on a "PST" server, but there are an awful lot of "EST" people who are on the server, mixed with a few large AUS and Japan guilds and you've got a high population server... but it's actually very very spread out and there's never really a good peak time.

Unfortunately, there's no real way to pick the server you'd like to play on based on the times you're going to play the game. If you're smart and can plan ahead before you start the game... or you don't mind rerolling or paying to transfer mabye you can figure out in advance where you need to play, but who really does that their first time in the game? Usually you play wherever your friends went, and if they picked a bad server for you, that's just how it goes.

I for one would love to see some realm mergers. They could balance some of the skewed horde/ally ratios by decomissioning a few servers here and there and offering free ally transfers to xx servers and free horde to xx servers where necessary and sorta "fix" a few of the things that are wrong with some of the non-high pop servers.

nobody likes a queue, but when it feels like there really isnt anyone around when you want to do things, it's not fair to have to pay an extra $25 to fix it.

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