Putting the numbers from Blake's picture into context, during spring 2001 EQ was estimated to have somewhere in the vicinity of 350,000 active subscribers. That suggests his picture was probably made during peak hours because 1/5 of the population being online concurrently is roughly industry average for maximum peak concurrent users relative to total subscriber count.
The highest I can recall seeing blue was in the 2000-2200 max population range during winter 2018-2019. Prior to then it also exceeded 2000 at peak for a time after Velious launch in 2015. Long-term averages tended to be lower though still higher than that of either individual P99 server today. Free MMOGs do not normally have as high a maximum concurrent proportion as subscription games do since people don't feel penalized for not logging in. In free games max concurrent is typically not more than 1/10 the total active user base and sometimes not even that.
I have not seen data on how the stigma and installation difficulty associated with being an emulator might affect P1999's relative concurrent populations. Between all three P1999 servers, depending on how that proportion breaks down it seems unlikely that there are fewer than about 7000 active players, and possibly several times that. 20,000+ is not unreasonable when compared to industry norms, again not accounting for emulator-specific issues. Only the admins who have access to host data could say, and they don't.
Danth
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