Statistically Speaking…
Describing the typical World of Warcraft player and character with numbers.
By Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle
What began as a head-scratcher about the power of World of Warcraft census information turned into a full-blown article tracking statistical tendencies of WoW players. This is not an attempt to reduce the entertainment potential of the game to cold, hard numbers. For one thing, I don't claim to have any incisive mathematical knowledge past an undergrad stats class. Instead, I sat down with these numbers to do what all of us want to do in an MMORPG at heart, something different than the majority. If you discover that errors exist, please let me know so I can make corrections! If the mistakes aren't rooted in the census numbers (collected 7/18/06), I plead an education devoted to business and writing at the cost of higher-level math. So, to wrap up this disclaimer, take these facts and figures as you will… I had a blast figuring this stuff out!
Generally Speaking
While Nick Yee's excellent Daedalus Gateway project, which sought to tracked the demographics and motivations of MMORPG players from 1999 on, hasn't kept pace with the World of Warcraft revolution, his research provides a place to start our study of the statistical tendencies of WoW players. By the numbers: 85% are male, 80% play with someone they know in real life, 75% of MMORPG players are age 20 or older, 50% have full time jobs, 36% are married, and 22% have children. Interestingly, that MMORPG players are mindlessly wasting their lives is only true if you believe that the average adult, gamer or non-gamer, is squandering a proportional amount of his or her time. The national average for television watching is around 28 hours, according to Yee, and MMO players spend 21 hours per week on average playing MMOs and 7.7 hours watching television.
It's difficult to speak in these general terms about World of Warcraft players; no attempts have yet been made to reconcile real life demographics with in-game WoW choices. However, thanks to the folks at WarcraftRealms.com, we have detailed data about the choices players make in terms of server, faction, race, and class, as well as limited data on player activity (level, guild progression, and server population). This data is gathered by players collecting and uploading data using the CensusPlus addon. As good as this data appears to be, note that census information only describes all characters actively playing World of Warcraft, not alternate or offline characters. At the time I write this, a significant portion of the subscriber base that has high-level characters is logged in as these characters to play the new 1.11 Naxxramas dungeon instead of lower-level alts that they might play otherwise. In the interest of full disclosure, I figured I should probably point that out!
One piece of general demographic info WarcraftRealms provides is time-of-day population tracking. Unsurprisingly, regardless of server type, server location, or whether we're talking Horde / Alliance, server populations are at their highest during the 8pm-11pm prime time hours and at their lowest from 2am-8am.
Server and Faction Choice
Table 1 - Server Type Breakdown
TypeRoughly two of every three players in World of Warcraft are playing as part of the Alliance. PvP and RP-PvP servers are better balanced than PvE and RP servers, offering a 45%-55% Horde-Alliance split to the roughly 30%-70% Horde-Alliance division on PvE / RP realms. Reasons for the across-the-board preference of the Alliance faction range, in my quick unscientific Darnassus-Elwynn Forest poll on the recently established Aerie Peak realm, indicated players were more comfortable with Alliance character appearance and the relative beauty of the Alliance starting areas. Five of ten of the new characters I talked to had other characters on the same realm, same faction, and six of the ten chose the server and faction because they had friends already playing on the server.
Though the Alliance has a clear numerical advantage, it should not be assumed that this automatically translates to a broad-based advantage when it comes to things like ease of grouping. The strength of the Horde lies in the lower standard deviation of the Horde's level distribution (table 3 on the second page). This means that Horde players are more evenly distributed level-wise than Alliance players, who show more of a tendancy to concentrate themselves in certain level groupings, such as at higher levels. So, at least theoretically, you should have a pretty good chance to find groups as a Horde player, even though fewer Horde are playing at any given time. At level 60, however, the advantage lies with the Alliance.
Racial Choice
Faction choice aside, about 60% of WoW players choose a roughly human looking race (human at least in stature and facial appearance, meaning night elf, human, or undead) rather than one of the other five less humanoid races. Players on PvP or RP-PvP realms are the least susceptible to this generalization (51%-52%), while players on PvE and RP realms are the most disposed (62%-63%).
Shorter races (gnomes, dwarves, and orcs) are far less preferable than taller races, each garnering less than half of their even split of the population. This height preference is far more apparent among Alliance players than Horde players; and though Alliance races have a more pronounced height disparity than Horde races, avoidance of the troll race due to a perceived weakness in troll racial traits (and preference granted the undead race for the converse reason) suggests that Horde players are less tied to character appearance than Alliance players.
Continue to Class Choice
and Level Distribution...
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