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May 17, 2005
Collecting Data from World of Warcraft
In constructing World of Warcraft, Blizzard made the interesting design decision to implement the client-side UI in a way that is open to extension and modification by the user community via an API. Combine this with a way to query the population in-game (the /who command), and it becomes possible for us to issue a decree to take a census of the known world.
Others (WoW Census, for example) have done this before, but for one reason or another, the data was not quite in the format we wanted, so we rolled our own. In essence, we have a way to collect a census snapshot of one faction of one server in about 5 to 15 minutes, depending on server load.
Fine print: Essentially, we loop through all race/class pairs (e.g., "Dwarf Paladin"), emit the appropriate /who command, and wait for the server to respond, at which point we stash away an entry in the SavedVariables.lua file of the form,
Thunderserver,2005/03/24,Crandall,56,Ni,id,y,Felwood,Ant Killers
for a level 56 night elf druid on the server Thunderserver. He's currently in Felwood, grouped ("y"), and is part of the Ant Killers guild. The server is only willing to return 49 entries to us at a time, so if there are more than that, we restrict the levels (e.g. "Dwarf Paladin 1-25") until we're sure that we're seeing everybody. (Caveat: We currently have no way to catch all players if there are more than 49 online gamers with the same race, class, and level. So far, we've only seen that with level 60 dwarf paladins at peak times. And we're ignoring this for the moment.)
We are currently collecting snapshots from both factions of three different worlds: the RP realm that we commonly play in, a normal server which was listed as having a moderate load, and a normal server which was considered to be heavily loaded.
After exiting the game, we have same Lua hackery to scavenge the data in SavedVariables.lua and leave it in a more permanent form on disk.
We've been harvesting data on and off since late March. (We have a manual upgrade process after each patch.) To date, we have taken about 6000 snapshots, or roughly a thousand snapshots per server per faction. Afterward, we're analyzing the collected data with our own Jawa application and Excel, but that's a story for another post.
Posted at May 17, 2005 04:17 PM
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Comments
I was wondering if your methodology allows you to gather gender data? I'm asking because i had the impression that there's an interesting gender-bias among different classes, where archetypical fighterclasses (like warriors, paladins) have predominantly male avatars and casterclasses (priests, mages) have predominantly female avatars.
Posted by: christoph at September 7, 2005 09:35 AM
The WoW API call we use to collect the census information does not return the avatar's gender, as far as I know. Obviously, the API provides some way to access the gender information of characters in your group, or that you have targeted, but does not seem to be accesible from a distance.
Posted by: Eric Nickell at September 7, 2005 10:54 AM
I agree there are gender skews but there are also confounds:
1) The male gnomes look older than the female gnomes (e.g. balding, or with comb-overs).
2) Some races have markedly different male and female avatars. E.g. the undead males are grotesque whereas the undead females are merely "gothic".
3) In general, it seems that more attention and finesse has been devoted to female avatars (the same was true with EverQuest). E.g. the male humans have (cough) retarded looking heads, whereas the females are attractive.
4) In general, the caster classes have clothing that looks feminine. A male night elf priest, for example, looks like a transvestite in standard priest garb.
Posted by: Tonio Loewald at November 1, 2005 02:09 PM
Additional Note: the melee class gear looks “tough” on male avatars and “skimpy” on female avatars.
Posted by: Tonio Loewald at November 1, 2005 02:11 PM
Update: While we've reported this elsewhere, I'll also note here that we have added 2 PvP servers to the list of servers we monitor, brining the total to 5. One of the PvP servers is low pop, the other high.
Posted by: Eric Nickell at December 13, 2005 09:08 AM
um so wheres the census data that you have come out with? i cannot see an easy to find link. please fix.
Posted by: joe guy at February 9, 2006 09:50 AM
The CensusPlus mod (available seperately or as part of the Cosmos UI), breaks it down by level, race, class, first letter of the user name. The site looks like it's down right now, but it's warcraftrealms.com -- you can see Cosmos at cosmosui.org
Posted by: Bart Humphries at February 13, 2006 02:15 AM