My hope is that the campaigns will be large enough to be interesting, but small enough that they'll be able to support a handful simultaneously.
Wild ass guessing:
Let's say that campaigns are tailored for a peak of 1000 simultaneous players.
Typical ratio is 5-to-1, i.e. 5 times more players than actual connected players at peak prime time, meaning a campaign is actually 5000 players who have joined.
Finally, lets say you have a ratio of 10% of potential players that are interested enough to do early backing, meaning the 18k backers translate into 180k players for the game.
Then, let's say about half of the people doing are willing to play at a given difficulty level and half would go higher, that gives you, scaled:
- 96k people who play in Faction-level campaigns
- 48k people who play in Godwar-level campaigns
- 24k people who play in Guild-level campaigns
- 12k people who play in Dregs campaigns
That would mean between 2 and 3 Dregs campaigns. This is highly assumption-sensitive WAG, but it sounds fairly plausible. And, before you object to the fact that this scheme has only 12k Dreg-level players while 18k backed the game with only a firm promise of the Dregs, what I'm saying here is that I wouldn't be surprised if a number of backers, given a choice, will probably play at a more "leisurely" level.