Blizzard has added new pages to their website where you can see data on the most auctions sold/created items/dangerous creatures/gathered items/looted items/quests completed in the last 7 days.

US: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/toplist/buttons.html
EU: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/gamestats/index.html

It makes for quite interesting reading, both seeing where individual items end up day by day, and across the two server groups. For example US Vael killed 10 times as many people on tuesday as on either friday or thursday, while EU Vael stays strong throughout the week. Or in other words, "Europeans don't celebrate Thanksgiving" :).
Drek'Thar kills around 2,6 times as many people as Vanndar, does that imply that the Alliance wins AV 2,6 times as often as the Horde? Or is one of them much more destructive, I've never done AV as Horde?

As for items, the only raid boss drop I found on the most looted items list was the Qiraji Lord's Insignia, and that not even every day.
Comparing with http://wow.allakhazam.com/dyn/top100lists.html (I guess this it the total number of drops reported since Alla started collecting data, it doesn't say), it looks like even the most common real raid drops would be a good deal further down the list.

Funny how there's no data on most killed monsters or the Alliance/Horde ratio, I guess that's too explosive topics for Blizzard to want to release data on that. The quests completed list does show the very first human quest being done a lot more than the others.

Anyone else found some interesting theories from the data?

As far as Drek'thar goes, AV is imbalanced in favor of Alliance as far as straight rushing to the enemy base. From Stonehearth to Dun Baldar is one giant bottleneck for the Horde. The numbers pretty much show this, Alliance has many many more opportunities to die to Warmasters and Drek'thar as opposed to Horde who are more often killed by bowmen.

European Mangled and Ravaged Cadavers seem much more dangerous than their US counterparts. I'm not entirely sure how/why they even feature on the list.

I know in many AV games that alliance won, we didn't have any healers (except cat form druids, dpsing pallys, and shadowform priests)... so with enough warriors we just took turns tanking until death (without any healing) and graveyard zerging. I don't know the horde map. Is it possible that this is harder for horde to do?

Sounds familiar, speaking as a hordie.

Doesnt Drek have a horrible enrage and a whirl wind where van just has a random charge? I think that's why, Drek eats up rogues.

Vanndar is a Mountain King, so he Storm Bolts random people, Thunderclaps and goes into Avatar form every so often. I don't think I've seen him bash anyone, though.

Those statistics are (near) useless without more qualifiers.

Does anyone really care that the most looted item this week was linen. And the most completed quest was the first ones you get in the lowbie zones?

Let me design my own query from information like "what were lvl60's with 3+ pcs of T3, and over 5Kg in their bank buying off the AH.

Granted, there are people who could probably already do this on their own, as they basically monopolize the Kilrogg (A) AH for anything worth a damn to raiders. At least I don't think people buy AH items through alts...

Yes he does. Vaandar's avatar is equal to Drek's enrage, but it's not up all the time. If the Horde hearth back to Drek's room, we can cause a lot of havoc by having people get hit with enraged Whirlwinds.

In AV, alliance bowmen have fewer line of sight issues on onrushing horde than their horde counterparts. Also, there are fewer NPCs around the frostwolf aid station than the stormpike aid station. Consequently, stormpike aid station is easier to defend than the horde aid station.

In my own experience, the best way to defend at the end as horde has been to concentrate far less on defending the aid station and position yourself inside frostwolf keep, using the recall ability on the trinket to return after death. You can slow down the usually tentative alliance with 5 or so players in the keep.

I find the "Most Quests Completed" metric the most interesting. The data is as follows, for one day on the NA servers (11/26/06):

1) 31,997 people complete "A Threat Within" (Human)
2) 22,727 people complete "The Balance of Nature" (Night Elf)
3) 22,002 people complete "Dwarven Outfitters" (Dwarf/Gnome)
4) 21,839 people complete "Your Place in the World" (Orc/Troll)
5) 14,874 people complete "The Mindless Ones" (Undead)
6) 12,311 people complete "The Hunt Begins" (Tauren)

There are a number of pertinent conclusions to draw here:

1) Blizzard is still raking in the dough.
2) 76,726 people completed the starting Alliance quests in one day. 49,024 people completed the starting Horde quests (possibly overlapping). That's a ratio of 1.565 to 1. If we generalize it, we could say that people roll 56.5% more Alliance than Horde on any given day.
3) 40.79% more people roll Human than the next closest race (Night Elf). People roll Human 260% more than the least rolled race (Tauren).
4) If we assume all the new characters completled their starting quest, that's 125,750 new characters rolled in one day. Spread over 102 NA servers, that's 1,233 new characters created per server per day. That's an average of 205 new characters per newbie area.

I wonder: why do so many people roll Human? I can only surmise is that a lot of them are new players. The numbers don't generalize to a good picture of the Horde: Alliance ratio at level 60 or during PvP, though. However, it will be interesting to see what happens when the expansion comes out and Blood Elves/ Draenei are released.

Defias Pillager is lol. I suppose it implies

-People suck at Westfall
-There are a lot of lowbies

I'm kind if surprised there's still that many newbies around leveling in Westfall. Black Dragon Whelp is up there too, but no one goes to Redridge, so wtf.

The pillagers roam around. What is happening is a player is not paying attention to the pillager type mobs and got ambushed.

Lots of people go to Redridge to level, it is a decent questing area. The dragon is there because many people think it is an easy target, and then they find out the fire damage easily kills them.


What I found interesting about the US stats, is on Monday Onynia killed the most, but on Wednesday Vael killed the most.

Tthe reason is the BWL reset is on Tuesday but many start BWL on Wednesday, and on Monday they kill Ony, or at least attempt to kill her ;).

There are many more low level characters playing the game than I ever imagined.

* Assorted Defias in the top 5 killer NPCs list
* Low level items gathered, looted and crafted
* Low level quests being completed

I would have guessed that the low level items were as much the result of the gate opening / war effort on newer servers and people changing tradeskills but the quest data dampens that theory. And I suppose I contribute a bit as well, family members buy the game and roll a toon on whatever server Blizzard suggests so I roll a low level toon to level with them for a bit.

I see Onyxia near the top of many lists, guilds are running her with smaller numbers and I see many more Onyxia PuGs than I used to, I'm sure they're wiping over and over again. Even when we take 20 people in we see her dead along with 5 or 10 of us.

I see the 20 man bosses and even the ZG Bat Riders in there. Bloodlord Mandokir is obvious, people are there for the idol and you can die multiple times to him. Ossirian is interesting, many still trying to master that fight. I've seen PuGs attempt it as well.

I see some of the named elites that hunters typically tame. Are that many deaths hunters trying to tame the mob? Most of them are quest targets as well, are people dying that often finishing quests or just grinding in that area?

Speaking of pets, I don't see 'cat' in the list (near the top of the list showed at Blizzcon) but I see Imp, Succubus and Felhound. Blizzard not filtering warlock pets?

Working through the Naxx bosses shows some interesting patterns but I'm not sure how to interpret them, except maybe to find some obvious raid days.

Defias Pillagers are easily the most dangerous mob in Westfall. If you go in the caves half the time you'll accidentally aggro two. That's pretty much a death sentence for most classes at that level.

I do think it's pretty funny Vael is the #1 killer of players on Tuesdays. I'm surprised Son of Arugal isn't very high, those bastards assassinated me more than I like to admit.

While those would be interesting to have more specific stats, I don't think that ever be a future feature (having epic clad player's AH buys looked at). I think the devs do collect that sort of information though, but I don't think it would be public viewable.

What is interesting about the linen is many people are rolling new characters.

"Cat" only shows up if the Hunter hasn't changed the default pet name. Still, it showed up on the last list, and not on this one. Imps, Succubus, and Felhound did not show up on the last list, either. I'm sure we can all speculate on reasons why that's the case.

Only sometimes :( 5 sec debuff, and it gets resisted often enough to be i) evident, and ii) annoying (in PvP).

Also, warlocks levels 10-60 are all creating Soul Shards - only level 60 mages with the quest for Crystal Water complete are conjuring that.

Sons of Arugal have been heavily nerfed since release. And yes I hate them too. BTW silverpine forest isn't a good place to level as there are very little non elite quests by there (even if, like most horde players, you hate the Barrens). I think there is a similar mob for alliance, in the dark forrest (the zone that may contain a green drake). This similar mob has been nerfed too.

I am sure the reason why "Cat" isn't on the list is how Blizzard is collecting the data. Since lock pets have names, it seems the database is recording the base type of pet (like Imp instead of Jaz'ethen or whatever).

There are hundreds of cat-type beasts, so one hunter is not likely to use the same cat as someone else. That is why Broken Tooth (1.0 speed) is on high on the list and King B (I think 1.3 speed and is a popular pet) is up high on the list.

These two might be related - it's possible that whatever logging they're doing now is tracking hunter pets as the base mob, hence the high placements for King Bangalash and Broken Tooth, etc (it can't be going by name, as that wouldn't track warlock pets as "Imp", "Succubus", or "Felhound", due to the randomly-generated names they get).

e;fb. Damn you frmorrison.