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WoW Forever: a million beta characters counted
A player-run census has scanned the whole beta: Skyborne is the most played race, Hunter the most played class, and the new pairings hold a third of everybody.
A census run by players has counted 1,003,125 characters on the WoW Forever beta. It is collected by an addon that scans names in the world, handed round to volunteers, so it is a sweep of who is actually logged in rather than a figure from Blizzard. The two sides come out almost level: 50.4% Alliance against 49.6% Horde.
The new race leads the whole list. Skyborne account for 18.7% of all characters, ahead of Undead on 16.6% and Human on 16.3%, and the smallest of the 10 races is Troll on 6.7%. Among classes the order is older than this game: Hunter first on 15.6%, then Warrior on 12.2% and Paladin on 11.8%.
What the numbers really show is appetite for the combinations Forever added. There are 16 race and class pairings that the original game did not allow, and they hold 35.5% of every character made. The most played pairing in the game is one of them: Undead Paladin, on 5.8%, ahead of Human Paladin on 4.5%. Dwarf Shaman takes 4.3% and Skyborne Druid 3.1%. The rarest pairing of all is Dwarf Rogue.
Levelling tells its own story. Only 6.8% of characters sit at 30, the cap on the beta, and the biggest single level is not the cap but 20, where more characters are parked than at 30. Another 26.3% never got past 10, which is what a test full of people trying a class for an hour looks like. The split between the rulesets is narrower than the faction split, with PvP a little ahead of Normal.
All of this is a beta and a scan, not a launch and not a registry. Characters made to try a combination for an evening count the same as the ones people mean to keep, and the beta closes on 21 October.
