Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
 
WoWjutsu

Did I mention that I love my readers? They are a source of a lot of interesting input. Today one anonymous commenter mentioned WoWjutsu, a site I had never heard of before. So I went and had a look, and found it very, very interesting.

The original purpose of the site seems to be to rank guilds world-wide, regardless of server. That didn't interest me much. But to do so they map the progress of all the guilds on all servers through the various raid dungeons, and that yields some very, very cool information, due to the way this is done. WoWjutsu's method is only using data from the Armory, not data collected or provided by the guilds itself. That makes the system relatively reliable and stable. What they do is simply check what characters wear what kind of epics. And as each epic can be backtracked to one boss mob killed, WoWjutsu can see what guild killed what raid boss how often, and calculate a score out of that. As I said, I wasn't interested in the score, and there are some obvious error margins involved in the calculation, like disenchanted epics etc.. Scores are contentious, because some people won't like to hear that Horde guilds outperform Alliance guilds, and Euro guilds outperform US guilds.

But the table WoWjutsu shows on the left column has such significant steps that the margin of error of the method is small compared to the result. The table lists the raid progress of all the major raiding guilds together. To be included in the count a guild has to apply on the WoWjutsu website, have at least 10 level 70s, and have a score which amounts to having been half through Karazhan at least. Thus "casual" guilds and players aren't counted. Now lets have a look at the currently displayed data:

Due to this being basically a requirement for being counted at all, 99.98% of the counted guilds have killed bosses in Karazhan. 64% killed at least one boss in Gruul's lair, 24% killed Magtheridon, 20% killed a boss in Serpentshrine Cavern, 22% in The Eye. Only 2.12% of guilds counted killed one of the bosses of Mount Hyjal, and only 1.83% in the Black Temple. Unfortunately there is no number representing how many percent of level 70 characters wear at least one raid epic, so we don't know anything about the ratio of raiders to non-raiders. But we *do* know that of all the guilds that made significant progress in Karazhan, and can thus be considered as "raiders", only 2% make it to the top. These numbers will increase a bit with time, but in any case it makes those places rather exclusive. No wonder WoW has something strongly resembling class warfare, if the underclass and the upper crust can be so easily identified by their gear.
Comments:
Well the site lists having data on 1.332.099 characters so we can assume at least that number are wearing raidepics. We also know that Blizzard states they have 9 million active accounts so that leaves us with roughly 14% of players that raid. Of course this number is skewered a bit as some people may have mains in SSC and alts in Karazhan.

What's more interesting to me is that 21% of people have killed Void Reaver, which means that lifting the entry requirements to The Eye have worked to some extent, although it's a bit odd that so few have killed more bosses in the eye as the trash before Void Reaver is harder than a boss like Alar.

Interesting data.
 
The actual progression data is kinda BS. The only actual value of the site lies within the ranking between guilds.

Simple example. My server has one guild flagged for Black Temple, but how come when the server still is waiting for its 1st Kelthuzad kill? Easy answer, they transfered one character with BT loot towards them, thus getting flagged as an BT guild there wich they aren't. One of many examples where whole guilds where marked as a raiding guild, cause a fracture of its members has some loot.

To sum it up, those small highend numbers are even way smaller than this site makes it look like.
 
sorry, i thot everyone knew about this place! : )

our guild found it a couple months ago, and i think it has actually helped us rally the guild to attempt gruuls and ssc!
 
We downed void reaver over 2 week sago and the site still shows we have not. Somethings off, since we got tier 5 tokens and trade em in for tier 5 shoulders do you think the site misses the shoulders due to the fact the actual shoulders dont drop off him?
 
I think Tobold is more interested in the actual numbers of people that raid (and what they raid) than in anything else. Sure, server transfers etc. mean that actual numbers when looked at from the outside mean little but the overall idea of Tobold's post, I think, is that of the raiders only 2% have seen BT (it's actually less but I'll round up to be generous). 2% of 1.332.099 characters effectively means that highend raids (like Hyjal and BT) cater to about 27.000 players. Again, compare that to 9 million current subscribtions worldwide and high-end raiding is for a very small minority.

For the record my guild is currently working on Kael'Thas and will soon enter Hyjal and BT so at the moment I'm not part of the 2%, although we are part of the 4% that killed Vashj.
 
The armory is only a snapshot; if you took off your gear and put it in the bank, then it won't be picked up by wowjutsu.
So for individual guilds it is not going to be very accurate, but for a strategic overlook of WoW, I think it does a good job of showing general progression.
 
Does the armory really have information on the characters of all 9 million active accounts (I was thinking it was just the 3 or so million in North America and European servers)? When someone becomes inactive do they drop out of the armory? How many players have multiple characters on same account that have raid equipment? All these questions have to be answered before coming remotely close to numbers of raiding players.
 
The information is actually much improved on wowjutsu from where it was. They are taking steps to make sure that guilds don't get improper credit for loot that somebody transferred in with. Personally, I left a guild and all of the loot that I earned in that guild still shows up under that old guild but my name is kind of "greyed out" showing that I'm not longer in the guild. I'm in a new guild and have received one piece of loot since joining, and if you look up the new guild you will see my toon name for that one piece of loot but not for any of the other epics I earned previously.

As for updating, they only update every so often unless you're in the top 1000 or so, then the updates happen more frequently. I can assure you that trading in shoulder tokens didn't throw off the wowjutsu system.
 
Question is, of the 20% or so who have killed something in SSC or The Eye, how many killed something other than Lurker or Void Reaver? I'd say that is the dividing line between the haves and have nots, and I'll bet if you remove those two bosses, the number of guilds with kills in thsoe two places drops to the single digit %.
 
Does the armory really have information on the characters of all 9 million active accounts (I was thinking it was just the 3 or so million in North America and European servers)?

Hmmm... I think The Armory only covers the EU and the NA, but even if the Chinese do have armory, they don't have the expansion AFAIK, which means they won't meet the minimum requirement. So the sampled playerbase is less than the world wide 9 million.

Won't really affect Tobold's point, though, even if the numbers might not be exact.
 
This post of mine really has nothing with this post of Tobold, but since it's one of his old favourite games I thought it would be cool to mention it. Puzzle Quest will apparently finally make it to the PC this fall. Yay! :)
I didn't see any release date but at least it's on the way. The demo was great so I'll be getting it for sure.
 
As a point of interest, I would suggest reading this blog as well. This fellow is actually attempting to parse all of the european armory and interpret the data. Last I saw he had 200,000 characters parsed. It isn't a lot, but his data is interesting.

http://okoloth.blogspot.com/

With regards to the rankings and such, I will attest that the number of raiding accounts to player ratio has to be greater than 1:1. In my small family-and-friends guild, there are 3 people who have 3 lv70 alts and 3 people with 2 lv70 alts that have all gotten gear from Karazhan. This vastly inflates the numbers. My guild has around 100 characters in it according to the armory, but there are only about 15 actual accounts involved.
 
I have been using Wowjutsu for a while now, it is very use full for guild shopping and takes the BS away from the kiddies that claim to have downed certain bosses when u actually find out they wipe on the Huntsman
 
yea the site is pretty neat. I find it interesting that guilds with the most BT clears still don't have warglaive for instance while other guilds get lucky and it drops first time lol. that has to suck. But it does give a way to have bragging rights and just another angle of fun for the game. I however got tired of competiting for best guild on the server regarding raid progression. Too many non raiders just want to automatically hate the best raid guilds due to jelously; or at least on my server that is why. If they applied and didn't get accepted they did nothing but flame every guild post on the forums lol. /sign, the pains of playing with the immature no matter their age
 
I used WOWjutso some 2-3 weeks ago to explain to one of our guild members, who was (in a nutshell) complaining that our raid progress was not fast enough and that all other guilds were overtaking us (we are a very casual guild of adults), that all was not so bad as he put it. Our guild was in the middle range on the server, with a lot guilds having cleared Karazhan, killed Maulgar and Gruul, trying on Magtheridon, SSC and Eye.

I also quoted the Mount Hyjal and Black Temple figures and started a bet what our server figures would look like 1 month before the next addon. My guess was <10% Mount Hyjal and <6% Black Temple if Blizzard does not make any changes (i.e. attunement, difficulty, upgrading current raid epics as they did with Karazhan epics). Blizzard will already upgrade the existing SSC / Eye Epics, a typical dagger (heart razor) will have its stats increased by 3%, expect the same for other epics over the course of the next months. It seems upgrading equipment has become the new way of finetuning raid difficulty?

Tobold, what do you think is easier, tuning a boss or tuning the equipment you need to take down a boss?
 
If you like wowjutsu check out http://wowdev.org/status/ for a graphical interface to it
 
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