Age and leveling speed

I've read that the world record for leveling a character in World of Warcraft from 1 to 60 is 4 days and 20 hours of /played time, but that was with being powerleveled. I don't know how many days of /played a typical "leet" player needs to level a new character on a new server up to 60, my guess would be it is in the 8 to 10 days range. So my Alliance priest, who leveled to 60 in 13 days of /played time on a new server wasn't that far behind. I could have gone faster if I hadn't spent so much time on earning money with fishing, and getting up my mining and tailoring tradeskills. Nevertheless in my now disbanded leet guild I was considered being very slow. Because they were measuring leveling speed not in /played days to 60, but in real time weeks to 60. At nearly 3 months to 60 I was way behind the curve, some of those guys did it in less than a month.

But of course if you want to reach level 60 in a month, and it takes around 10 days of /played, or 240 hours, you need to play 8 hours per day. No can do, for me. Between work and family I get around 4 hours of play per day, and even that is something that many people would consider already a lot. Even when I was on holidays I didn't play much more than 4 hours per day, there are other things in life than World of Warcraft. (Don't be surprised. I just tend to write less about the other things in life.)

So now I am in a new guild, more of a friendly family-style guild, not leet at all, and only a handful of guild members is already at 60. And I quickly noticed in guild chat that even besides the "leet" aspect, these people are markedly different than those in my previous guild. The majority of them were a lot more mature. And after asking around a bit, it turns out that yes, the average age in the guild is mid-20s, while the average age in the previous guild was in the teens.

And suddenly it made perfect sense. The previous guild was kids on summer holidays, with endless amounts of time on their hands, easily able to hit 60 in a month. Come September it is back to school, attendance rate to raids dropped, which ultimately lead to the guild disbanding. If you plotted a graph of all the players ages and how many weeks they took to level up to 60, you would get a cloud with all sorts of points, but a definitive correlation between age and leveling speed. Of course that is not an absolute correlation, there is always the unemployed adult or the kid actually studying instead of playing. But the trend is certainly there.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link