Downtime and More Player Distribution

Yesterday, the World of Warcraft Servers came down for a major revision patch. The servers did not all come back up until after 930 pm. As with all major patches, sometimes there are problems that arise that cause additional downtime. This morning, I logged on, and the world felt really empty. So I decided to query the server and find out how many players were online.
A mere 873. As you can see from the graph below, a majority of the players are still clustered in the first 20 levels. At level 7 there's a massive drop off in players from 50 down to 23. Interestingly enough, this also corresponds to the first "freedom of choice" occurance in the game where players have to leave the area they started in, and venture outside of the starting zone. It's also approximately the level that players reach the captial cities (where the banks and auction house are), so either these players are being used to evaluate the class by exploring the first 7 levels of gameplay, or they are being used to evaluate the state of the server in terms of maturity in items, or they could be set up as mules to hold inventory.

The highest level at this point is 56, it's likely that today or tomorrow will see the first Alliance level 60 on the server, a mere week and a day after the server came up (taking into account the 18 hours downtime we had yesterday).