Yes, More WoW Stats

What would the world be like without graphs? Bleak, I dare say. They are like the rainbows of mathematics... So imagine my delight when I discovered a blog dedicated to not simply graphs, but graphs about World Of Warcraft. Look at this beauty, which charts PVP Rank against faction. Cor.

This graph shows that "The Alliance-Horde imbalance (2:1 in our sample) makes it easier for Horde characters to enter PvP BGs. This means that given the same amount of play-time, Horde has less wait time, and thus more practice. This might also encourage forming groups ahead of time (i.e. prefabs) because it doesn't impact wait times, whereas it would in the Alliance case."

But you know what? There's much more.

Yep, the heady world of World Of Warcraft numbers has plenty of interested parties. Take, for example, this terrifying data website, Armory Musings. There's more information there than I can imagine what to do with. What would you use all that for? It is stats porn? Equally worrying are the build tables over at The Build Mine, which have the breakdown of how talents are set up for various characters.

More obviously useful is WoW Insider's The Build Shop, a blog about how to structure your talent trees for various characters. Because you won't want a badly skilled Warlock, eh?

It turns out that all this information has come about via the World Of Warcraft Armory, which allows 'data-miners' (as they style themselves) to search for all kinds of information about "characters, items, guilds, dungeons, arena teams, bosses, and faction rewards". It's perhaps a measure of the sheer amount of stuff that WoW has generated that a service like this seems more like an inevitability than a luxury.

Also, what does all this stat-crunching reveal about the soul of World Of Warcraft. Is its success really in world building, or in eminently graspable numbers?