World of Warcraft Passes 100 Million Players, Mostly Alliance

[Cognimancer]

World of Warcraft Passes 100 Million Players, Mostly Alliance

World of Warcraft is obviously popular, but a new infographic reveals that it goes further than that - Azeroth's population surpasses that of most countries.

Despite its slow decline in active subscribers [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129393-World-of-Warcraft-Slows-Losses-As-Activision-Beats-Q3-Outlook], World of Warcraft is a pretty darn healthy MMO. Blizzard released an infographic today to celebrate the crossing of a threshold: since its release ten years ago, a whopping 100 million accounts have been created. That includes trial accounts, mind, but there's no denying it's an impressive census. In fact, it's more than twice the entire population of South Korea, as the infographic happily points out.

All in all, Azeroth has a population of about 500 million player characters (an average of five per account, by our math), hailing from 244 countries and territories around the world. 52% of those characters are members of the Alliance, while 47% joined the Horde. Since Pandaren characters start out neutral, there's also 1% of characters who are still on the fence. It just goes to show that the filthy Alliance only wins because of superior numbers. And no, I'm not bitter.

World of Warcraft's economy is still booming as well. Every day sees about 2.8 million trades through the Auction House, which was twice the activity of eBay on Cyber Monday a few years ago. All that trade is handled by just 71 auctioneer NPCs in the game world, who each probably deserve a serious raise.

You can see the full infographic in all its glory over at Battle.net [http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/12346804]. There's a lot of big numbers, and they're well-earned; WoW has been more or less the reigning champion of MMOs for a full decade now. Azeroth still has over 7 million active players as of the last report, and something tells me that its community won't be leaving it anytime soon.

Source: Battle.net [http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/12346804]

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[INVALIDUSERNAME]

Congrats to WoW on 10 years of success. I may have stopped playing years ago and definitely don't agree with the direction the game has taken since Cataclysm, but I still consider those first years playing the game, from it's launch in 2004 until I quit in 2010, to have been some of the best years of my gaming life.

For the Alliance.

 

[Compatriot Block]

It just goes to show that the filthy Alliance only wins because of superior numbers. And no, I'm not bitter.

Alliance? Winning? Where?

Not with Metzen at the helm. Our closest thing to a victory in the last half of Mists was killing the Warchief that you guys didn't even want anymore, then giving your capital back for free along with the most weak, floppy, flacid threat ever.

But that sounds way more bitter than I meant it to. The neutral stories this expansion have been good, and I had fun playing, so that's what really counts.

 

[Charli]

With the 10th Anniversary coming up this year I'm very interested to see what they come up with as a celebration.

It'll probably coincide with the launch of Warlords. So...hmmm. Anyway, I still play WoW, though it's mainly like an evening session of DnD for me and my guild mates. We treat raiding quite similarly to a hobby, and for the enjoyment I get out of it I have no issues paying the sub fee. It's still an excellent game and I'd recommend giving it a go if you've never attempted to fully level a character.
The rabbit hole goes very deep though if you're a collecter sort or a lore nerd. Be warned.

 

[CriticalMiss]

How many of those are Chinese gold farmers?

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Impressive numbers for a single game. So, with all that cash could Blizzard maybe come out with there new MMO already. Or someone else topple their throne and balance out the MMORPG scene. I'm getting tired of emails from "Blizzard" saying I've been selling gold illegally when I've never played WoW.

 

[UNHchabo]

My friends played in the early days of WoW when I was in college; I remember one of them saying that they looked at the playercount graph for their server, and they surmised that Horde was mostly made up of college students, and Alliance of mostly high school kids.

The Horde started seeing more players come online around 10AM, rise up steadily to peak in the evening, then start dropping off gradually from 10PM-4AM. Meanwhile, the Alliance wouldn't really have many people in the morning and afternoon, then there was a huge spike at 3PM (when school gets out), then a temporary drop around 6 or 7PM (dinnertime), and a huge drop at 10-11PM (bedtime). The data seemed to fit his conclusion.

 

[The World Famous]

I guess 52% of WoW players are filthy casuals.

 

[shintakie10]

Probably one of the more staggering numbers for me is the instances created per day. 900k pve and 670k pvp instances are done, per day on average. Thats a terrifyingly large number. And pet battles! 3.6 Million pet battles a day! I knew pet battles were popular, but holy damn that's crazy.

Here's to another 10 years of awesomeness!

 

[Therumancer]

Impressive numbers for a single game. So, with all that cash could Blizzard maybe come out with there new MMO already. Or someone else topple their throne and balance out the MMORPG scene. I'm getting tired of emails from "Blizzard" saying I've been selling gold illegally when I've never played WoW.

They are apparently working on a new game called "Project Titan" of which not a lot has been said, other than it seems like some kind of genere mash up with both fantasy and science fiction elements.

As far as toppling WoW, honestly the big problem is nobody wants to put in the effort to really make a go for it. Generally speaking most MMOS are 90% hype, few launch with any kind of endgame capable of sustaining them (odd when they are trying a subscription model), and almost all of them seem to be shocked at their failure with people saying "but we launched with more stuff than WoW had when it launched"... being incapable of understanding that they aren't competing with WoW as it launched, but what WoW is now.

Truthfully I thought "The Old Republic" was going to do it, I really did, and said this quite a bit. EA/Bioware seemed to be putting in the money to actually produce enough content to do it. At the end of the day though while their product was decent, it lacked a lot of the crucial features that it needed, such as a strong endgame, and really while the voice acting and such was nice, that all came at the cost of playable content. I still pop into ToR once in a while, but almost see it as a single player game that happens to have other people running around, rather than a real MMO, the stories are good, but the MMO aspects are extremely "meh". What's more when you consider their big new expansion is a deathmatch dogfighter action mini-game it sort of shows that these guys have no idea how to manage an RPG never mind an MMORPG. I mean cripes, we could have had them working on something like EVE where we could fly around smuggling and trading cargo and stuff. People were already complaining about the "on rails" tunnel shooter mini-game not working for space combat because it wasn't RPG or what people wanted to do. Their brain storm "more action twitchy finger in spaaaace" since so many people seemed to love that aspect of the game to begin with... :/

 

[DugMachine]

Yes, 100m accounts CREATED. But tell me one thing, Bliz. How many of them are still played? All this is is Acti-Bliz desperately trying to get a positive light on them with ESO coming just around the corner, and grumblings from the vast majority of it's leaving player base about what a boring, hand-holding slog it's become. Cus I promise you, EA's Origin has a shit ton of accounts CREATED to, but a damn sight less of them active.
Pathetic.

What's pathetic is the notion that ESO is somehow a threat to WoW. I've played the beta. I understand it's not complete but I have to say I'm not impressed and have basically lost all interest in the game whereas WoD has me interested. But hey, that's just me.

 

[DugMachine]

Whereas I played Vanilla WoW up to Cata and watched it die, horribly. A lot of the stats they mention on their infograph are either stupid and meaningless "L90ETC plays 30,000 shows every year!" desperate for something nice to say "People Youtube WoW a lot!" or blatantly misleading, such as the 100m subscribers, as mentioned before. No one said ESO was a threat, I just said Bliz saw it, and wanted to try to get more attention. Of course, it could also be from the massive migration of it's players to better pastures. I believe I read around 40k or so?

Note, that not only does this 100m count every player who left when they started sucking up the game, but it counts, as said above, gold farmers, bots, banned accounts, alts to those banned accounts.

Suck WoW's dick harder, kid, you won't change facts. WoW wants to impress me? Stop trying to jump on memes to get attention, stop trying to inflate your numbers like that, and tell me the strait facts.

I'd also like to point out, what have been WoW's biggest draws since after Burning Crusade? It's not "Hey, play our game, it's fun!" Or "Hey, our game has awesome lore!" It's Mr. T, Pandas, and shit like this.

Oh the infographic I could give two shits about. I know most of the numbers are there to make the game look nice. My problem is you bringing up ESO in the first place. I'm willing to bet that's not what made them create this. They have a new expansion on the horizon that's for sure going to gain them some resubs, no matter how much you ***** and moan or whatever new "wow killer" is coming out this month.

That was my problem. But what do I know? I'm just a dick sucking "kid", right?

 

[DugMachine]

|
Considering the fact that you throw a hissy fit because I bring up a game at all, that is coming down the pipeline (fact), and project so hard I thought I was at a fucking theater? Yeah, you're a dick sucking kid. And no one said WoW killer.
Sounds like you got a little confidence issue there sonny-boy.

And still waiting for you to defend WoW's practices in giving free lv 90's, doing peoples talent tree's for them, all but doing their quests for them, waving Mr. T around in their advertising to the point of hilarity, just HAPPEN to make an expansion about panda's and monks on the heels of "Kung Fu Panda", pulling THAT pathetic cash grab RIGHT out their asses, Microtransactions, or any of the other numerous bullshit that they've pulled since Activision bought them and crippled what used to be a phenomenal game with tons of lore, exploration, and social fun to be had.


I'm waiting.....

You keep assuming I don't have the same problems with WoW as you have. But because I still play the game I must be an avid fanboy yearning for the Blizzard cock. I don't need to defend shit because most of what you say is true. I merely said it was pathetic that you even bring up ESO, a game I have tried and disliked. Even leaving a disclaimer basically saying this is just my opinion but you throw huge wall of texts about an infographic I give not one single fuck about and assuming I love everything WoW is and has become.

Either way I'm done. I know your kind, I can smell the fucking euphoria through my computer screen.

 

[MrMixelPixel]

Boy howdy! Am I happy I started playing again near the end of MoP. I even managed to get some new blood into the mix, 3 of my friends that have never played WoW before decided try it and are loving it. Looking forward to Warlords~

 

[gamegod25]

"It just goes to show that the filthy Alliance only wins because of superior numbers. And no, I'm not bitter"

No need to be bitter, one horde is worth a thousand Alliance noobs!

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

As much as I don't feel it's the game for me, gotta give props to WoW. That's an impressive number no matter which way you slice it. Congrats to them.

 

[Jorec]

Yay Alliance! I ended up getting back into WoW after playing some Hearthstone. I hit the level cap for the free version and it's still as fun as I remember it being. I'll probably end up buying the upgrade to unlock the rest of the game since it's like 20 bucks and I could probably hit 85 by the end of the free month. Dunno if I should shell out the extra ten or not on MoP though.