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September 17, 2005
Fastest Leveling Times
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 8/07/2005 12:00 am - 8/14/2005 12:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is leveling event. We tabulate the time between a character's level and when we observe them at a new level. Only a player's online time is counted. We exclude the first leveling event from every character because it doesn't constitute the total amount of time to make that level.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 149,240 leveling events
To get a sense of the fastest leveling times, we calculated the top 1st percentile, 5th percentile, and 10th percentile of times it takes to get from one level to the next. We summed these times to get a lower bound on the time it takes to get to level 60. This is a lower bound because we're not tracking any actual characters from level 1 to 60 but the fastest times it took any character to get from one level to the next. Also, significantly lowered leveling times may be due to turning in quests where the work was done from the previous level.
Here is the plot for the time it took the fastest characters to reach the next level.
The graphs below show the time to level by class and top percentiles. Interestingly, several classes that overall have long leveling times had much lower leveling times in the top percentiles (i.e., Druids and Hunters).
Levels 1-20
Levels 21-40
Levels 41-60
The table below shows the estimated time to reach level 60 by class and top percentiles based on the data above. The lower bound produced by the top 1st percentile times hovered between 4 and 5 days. For the 5th percentile times, the lower bound was between 6 and 7 days. And finally, the lower bound was between 7 and 8 days for the top 10th percentile.
Finally, we chart the estimated time it takes for characters of different classes to reach level 60 by the top percentiles.
Posted at September 17, 2005 11:24 AM
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Comments
The spike in levelling time for level 40 can be attributed to the purposeful delay to acquire material wealth with which to purchase a mount. Since 40 is the earliest that one can acquire a mount, it is seen as a status symbol.
Since Warlocks and Paladins have quests to attain 'special' mounts at this level, you should find in your data, that the spike is absent in those two classes.
Posted by: Mike Dowd at October 14, 2005 11:18 AM
also at level 30 and 40 you bump up a bracket in Battlegrounds. I know i held my character at level 30 for a long time to play BG longer before going to the next bracket...
Posted by: drat at November 2, 2005 03:12 AM
Drat, we should definitely look for the effect you describe, but much of our data was collected before BGs existed, and we still saw the same kind of spike at 40.
Posted by: Eric Nickell at November 14, 2005 08:33 AM
What would be interesting to see is the same data based off of the second level gained during a play session. This would help cut out a large number of the people who made quite a bit of progress for level #2 (2nd level event) by turning in quests where the work was done from the previous level.
Posted by: CR at January 5, 2006 07:44 AM
CR, I'm not sure that would help all that much, even though it's an interesting idea.
First of all, while it's fairly common to see two leveling events in the same session for lower levels, this becomes very rare at higher levels.
Second, I believe the way we're doing this parse is that as long as the bots were operating continuously, we include leveling events that spanned multiple player sessions. So the problem isn't really tied to player sessions, but tied to cases where a player -- in whatever session -- was eligible to turn in quests that would level them, but for whatever reason deferred turning in those quests until a later time. This could be because they were in an instance, not near the quest-giver, or decided to defer leveling to stay in a certain BG level range.
Third, there are still very odd ways to level extremely fast, even in one session. Example: I wanted my human mage to ride a tiger mount in the pre-runecloth quest days, by doing the morrowgrain repeatable quests. I played the auction house and collected quite a pile of morrowgrain before she was ever able to turn it in. In a single session, she turned 47 (I think), returned to Feathermoon, and by walking between the mailbox and the quest turn-in, leveled to 48 a few minutes later.
Posted by: Eric Nickell at January 6, 2006 09:13 AM
The numbers look strange to me - The top 1% of warriors are shown as the fastest levelers overall, yet they rank last for the 21-40 and the 41-60 brackets. Can someone explain why that is?
Posted by: Raymond at October 12, 2006 06:28 PM
Well, Mob health and stuff take a drastic jump after lvl 20... and gear starts to make good sense at 20 too. Throws shamms and wars back in the line if u ask me
Posted by: Shrish at September 12, 2008 02:36 AM