Characters in BGs after Burning Crusade

21 February 2007 | PlayOn authors archive

The Burning Crusade changed the WoW landscape a lot. One area that was significantly impacted was the number of unique characters in the old BGs (Alterac, Ararthi, Warsong, & Eye of The Storm). The end-game BGs which many level 60 characters spent time in were suddenly almost deserted and back at almost pre-cross-realm queue times. Now, it’s intuitive that post-60 content is more appealing to many players than the same old BGs. What may be less obvious is the added pressure for those level 60 players to get the expansion pack. Level 60 players who were content to just PvP now have to endure much much longer wait times to get into BGs. In other words, level 60 life without the expansion pack became difficult. Anecdotally, it also soon became clear to the BG stragglers that the people stuck in those BGs were the ones who didn’t have the expansion – yet. It’s also interesting to point out this caused a large shift from a competitive orientation (in BGs) to a leveling/achievement orientation (in BC content) for many WoW players.

Data Note: We had a data collection mix-up that accidentally ignored all post-60 characters until the 29th of January. When we did get that data in correctly, the same trend was seen on the 30th and 31st. So the large drop isn’t simply due to us not seeing post-60 characters at first.
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of January 2007 up till the 16th.
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique level 60 character each day.
Sample Size: Peak of 10,500 characters across 5 servers.

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