10 Years in Azeroth Part 1--Characters Over the Years

Alternative Chat has a documentary she's putting together about players over the past 10 years of World of Warcraft. While I intend on answering her 10 questions eventually, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to dive into my own past and dig for clues to my playing habits, and perhaps some historical information on WoW itself.

A small caveat, I have deleted characters in the past. I know of at least three mages and a rogue I have deleted off-hand--my very first character, a mage I ran in TBC until I quit for a while, my primary character from the end of TBC to Ulduar, and I tried leveling a rogue to no avail, respectively--so my stats won't be completely accurate, especially concerning my love affair with magi in my earlier days, but it's still pretty interesting.

41 Characters, at least 4 deleted, I'm pretty sure there are more missing, too.

So I ran through ALL of my characters and noted their levels, classes, races, time played, and other interesting notes that I could remember. Below is a spreadsheet of the information that I put together (you should be able to click the sort arrows to futz with the sorting order).

I've learned a few interesting things from all of that data.

First of all, I have a slight bias towards Alliance, however, the Alliance skew occurred in Wrath onwards. Most of my characters pre-Wrath were Horde. Wrath was when I was co-running my own small guild, then switched to a big guild (to which I am still in today), so I'm going to guess the stability of guilds helped that pattern.

You'll notice there are no rogues on that list. I tried leveling a rogue once, it was awful. That was with heirlooms, too, so leveling speed wasn't the issue. It was just the class was dull to me.

But barring all the mages I've deleted, the most popular classes based on number of characters in descending order are shaman, paladin (not surprising), warlock (!?), hunter, mage, warrior, priest, druid, death knight, and monk. But if you add up total levels of all characters of a given class, it tells a different story:
 

Not only do I have a lot of shaman, I play them a lot, too. And they're almost all Enhancement. For having so few druids, though, I have a LOT of levels. I apparently tend to stick with druids a lot longer than other character classes. And where I have a LOT of warlocks and hunters, and a number of warriors, I tend to abandon them all quite early. Priest is artificially inflated by 27 levels because one was level 63 before I boosted him to 90 for professions, so it should be lower than the hunters.

I really, really wanted to love hunters early on, since I had so many, but I don't particularly enjoy pet classes in general so I tend to abandon them, Frost mages excepted.

Total time played for characters that still exist: 180 Days, 11 Hours. So half of a year or my life in the past 10, and the majority of that on my three current main characters who've existed since Wrath.

It's interesting to note how much time it took to level older characters versus characters today. Looking at the Level 27 - 29 characters, the 27 Tauren Warrior and 27 Worgen Druid were leveled in MoP with Heirlooms, taking about 6 - 8 hours to get there. Compare that to the level 28 characters and the 27 Blood Elf Warlock who were TBC characters, taking 36 to 44 hours to get to the same level. However, the 27 Tauren Warrior was a Wrath character, and took about 24 hours to do the same (I honestly don't remember if he had Heirlooms or not, but they were introduced around Wrath if memory serves).

Then if you look at the level 42 Troll Hunter at 3 and a half days (TBC) versus the Level 48 Tauren Paladin at 1 and a half days (Cata), and the level 38 Pandaren Monk at half a day (MoP).

I'm not saying we should have longer leveling times. Given the end game is where my interest lies, I'm quite fine with the acceleration of the leveling process. Also, the times are skewed because I've gotten more knowledgeable and better at the game over time, so the shrinkage is compounded. But it was fun data.

If we take the time played data by class rather than total levels, the order switches around a little bit:

I may have more shaman at higher levels, but I clearly prefer playing on my paladin(s), and the two classes have the lion's share of my time in comparison to the other classes.

Races aren't terribly interesting in my case with the exception that I clearly prefer Humans and Tauren. The rash of Worgen are misleading. That was just me attempting to like the race because werewolves. But alas, not to be.

So that was my trip back statistically. Next post I'll actually address Alternative Chat's 10 Years 10 Questions.

#10Years10Questions, #WoW, #Personal