Fun with WarcraftRealms: the CensusPlus Project
Posted July 07, 2008 at 11:45 AM by Warpy
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Censusplus is an add-on I first found in CosmosUI, long ago. When you run it, it uses the "who" command to collect data about everyone in your faction who is logged on at a given time. After you've collected what you feel to be a pretty representative sample, you can open the results page and get a pretty good picture of your side of the server. Your "who" database grows every time you do a census and you have the option of pruning old data every so often. You were encouraged to upload your database to a website called WarcraftRealms where a troll named Rollie would do something mysterious with it.
At first, these results just seemed vaguely interesting, but when I talked to other players about class balance it helped to know which races/classes are the most popular, because it was the only metric we had back in WoW 1.12. Back in October, 2006, this is the kind of argument I'd get into on Blizzards' Warlock forums:
).
Rollie's own research apparently focuses on concurrency: total player activity and how it varies with time of day, season, release of new WoW content, release of rival games, and so forth.
WarcraftRealms has lots of useful ways to display data, and they tend to rely only on recent entries. Since the data are provided by volunteers, some realms don't have enough data for one faction or another to give meaningful information. To figure out which realms have adequate data, look at the big list at Realm Data > US Stats or EU stats. Much like the Blizzard list, you can get in-game, it will tell you the realm type, time zone, and population level. It will also give you an idea of how often each faction of the realm is censused (which tells you how reliable WarcraftRealms data is for that faction). Adequate census levels are green, problematic ones are yellow, and unreliable ones are red. In the example below, Warcraftrealms has good data for the Alliance side of Aegwynn, but inadequate data for the Horde side.
If you are thinking of leveling a toon on a PvP realm, the WarcraftRealms table also tells you the ratio of Alliance: Horde activity. If you want the cachet of leveling a character on a PvP server without most of the hassle, roll Horde on one of the following as of July 2008:
To get a close look at any server, go to Realm Data > WoW Census and select your server and faction.
It can be used to determine if a character server-transferred (requires a little deductive reasoning), how fast they leveled, how long they've been playing, and most importantly, their guild history. The following history is from a night-elf priest who applied to a guild I was in (name left out to protect the guilty). This guy changes guilds more often than he changes his socks! And he swore up and down that he is not a "guild-hopper."
Warcraft realms also has:
Warcraftrealms doesn't do anything with the Armory (and predates it considerably). It relies entirely on volunteers using the Censusplus mod to collect data and then upload it. Many realms, especially low-population ones, don't generate enough data for one or both factions to give reliable numbers. Until recently, Censusplus didn't work really well if the user had a lot of of other mods, especially Ace mods. That would be most of us raiders.
However, Rollie wrote a new version and released it last month which seems to be working better. The only problem I've found is if you open the social window while taking a census, Censusplus will keep opening it(had that in the old version too). So hopefully, there will be more participation and lots of useful new numbers. You can run it in two modes. The command "/censusplus" opens the census window and you can issue commands and see results there, or "/censusplus take" will just take the census in the background so you can farm, etc. If your character enters an instance (includes battlegrounds and boats), the census will stop. You upload your results outside the game, either by using Uniuploader or just logging in to Warcraftrealms and following the directions.
All screenshots kidnapped from http://www.warcraftrealms.com/
At first, these results just seemed vaguely interesting, but when I talked to other players about class balance it helped to know which races/classes are the most popular, because it was the only metric we had back in WoW 1.12. Back in October, 2006, this is the kind of argument I'd get into on Blizzards' Warlock forums:
Whiny mage: "Warlocks are totally overpowered."Anyone remember WoW 2.0? Blizzard's data, collected directly from their own servers, is quite a bit better than WarcraftRealms'. Hunters were popular with players, but apparently not so likely to enter instances, especially raid instances, so they did get some significant buffs. We also had considerably more Alliance than Horde overall, which I think explains the choice of the wildly popular Blood Elves as the new Horde race. It worked! Warlocks are up to 9% of Kul Tiras Alliance toons as of July 2008 (and mages are down to 10%
Warpy: "Then why are we so rare?"
Whiny mage: "Huh?"
Warpy: "Only 6% of the level-60 Alliance toons on Kul Tiras are warlocks. At least twice that many are mages. I predict that Blizzard will really buff warlocks, druids, and priests in this upcoming Burning Crusade expansion in order to balance out the classes. Popular classes like mages, warriors, and hunters will be lucky to be ignored."
). Rollie's own research apparently focuses on concurrency: total player activity and how it varies with time of day, season, release of new WoW content, release of rival games, and so forth.
WarcraftRealms has lots of useful ways to display data, and they tend to rely only on recent entries. Since the data are provided by volunteers, some realms don't have enough data for one faction or another to give meaningful information. To figure out which realms have adequate data, look at the big list at Realm Data > US Stats or EU stats. Much like the Blizzard list, you can get in-game, it will tell you the realm type, time zone, and population level. It will also give you an idea of how often each faction of the realm is censused (which tells you how reliable WarcraftRealms data is for that faction). Adequate census levels are green, problematic ones are yellow, and unreliable ones are red. In the example below, Warcraftrealms has good data for the Alliance side of Aegwynn, but inadequate data for the Horde side.
If you are thinking of leveling a toon on a PvP realm, the WarcraftRealms table also tells you the ratio of Alliance: Horde activity. If you want the cachet of leveling a character on a PvP server without most of the hassle, roll Horde on one of the following as of July 2008:
- Blackwing Lair - 1:2.5
- The Forgotten Coast - 1:2.7
- Anub'Arak - 1:2.5
If you are Alliance, you have to do it the hard way. Horde players tend to be outnumbered on PvE servers, and Alliance tend to be outnumbered on PvP servers. In fact, things got so bad on Thaurissian that Blizzard actually let Alliance characters from high-population PvE servers transfer over. However, a server in real trouble is likely to have become low-population, especially for the weak faction (for example, Onyxia, as of July 2008) and may not be contributing much Censusplus data. If older data ever become available, it would be interesting to see how various PvP servers have changed over time, but you can watch Thaurissian recover day-by-day (Alliance activity is up to almost 1/3 that of the Horde, as of July 2008).
To get a close look at any server, go to Realm Data > WoW Census and select your server and faction.
- The ratio of level 70's to earlier levels will give you an idea of how "serious" versus "casual" the faction is.
- It will also list the biggest guilds in terms of total XP. The very biggest are likely to be made up of casual end-gamers with lots of alts, but your top raiding guilds will be in the top fifteen or so.
It can be used to determine if a character server-transferred (requires a little deductive reasoning), how fast they leveled, how long they've been playing, and most importantly, their guild history. The following history is from a night-elf priest who applied to a guild I was in (name left out to protect the guilty). This guy changes guilds more often than he changes his socks! And he swore up and down that he is not a "guild-hopper."
Warcraft realms also has:
- Guild rosters, and lists of ex-members
- Downloadable *.csv files with the total character counts (by race/class/level) from each server, but only recent data are availableLively forums and handy links and articles
- Limited PvP data collected by users of the WR_killing fields mod, but not too many interesting reports yet. So far, it's just individual BGs/arenas and an overall summary of all BGs in Azeroth and with very limited data. Still the Horde are winning WSG a lot.
Warcraftrealms doesn't do anything with the Armory (and predates it considerably). It relies entirely on volunteers using the Censusplus mod to collect data and then upload it. Many realms, especially low-population ones, don't generate enough data for one or both factions to give reliable numbers. Until recently, Censusplus didn't work really well if the user had a lot of of other mods, especially Ace mods. That would be most of us raiders.
However, Rollie wrote a new version and released it last month which seems to be working better. The only problem I've found is if you open the social window while taking a census, Censusplus will keep opening it(had that in the old version too). So hopefully, there will be more participation and lots of useful new numbers. You can run it in two modes. The command "/censusplus" opens the census window and you can issue commands and see results there, or "/censusplus take" will just take the census in the background so you can farm, etc. If your character enters an instance (includes battlegrounds and boats), the census will stop. You upload your results outside the game, either by using Uniuploader or just logging in to Warcraftrealms and following the directions.
All screenshots kidnapped from http://www.warcraftrealms.com/
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