Can anyone tell me exactly what the census represents?

[Guest]

Cool addon.

When I run the census I only get information about my faction. Can anyone tell me exactly what the census represents?

Clearly it only includes the realm I am on. Is the census limited geographically in any way or do the numbers represent the whole realm's population for my faction?

Are offline characters counted?

Thank you in advance for any responses.

[Rollie]

The census basically takes a snapshot of all characters on your server, of your faction, that are online at the time you run the census.

The website takes that data and combines it with other people's census information to create a more accurate picture.

[WhiteDragon]

Thank you. The data makes much more sense now.

[Guest]

So to get the most accurate info, we run the census several times per server, at different times of day? Might take a bit of time, but if you create new characters to run the census, you can listen to the jokes and flirts for each race / sex while you wait. Most people have never heard the females of any of the races.

[Rollie]

Well, the key is to have many people submitting data, and not relying on a few individuals to create/delete characters across servers to gather data.

If only 1 person for each server will take census data once per hour, then the data would be very close to accurate. If each of those people were to do it individually, you'd need some 2000 submissions. When you consider that there are hundreds of thousands of players, there would need to only be a tiny percentage of players to submit data.

And that's the hope! Granted, until we reach a time when the updates are coming in regularly and census takings regularly, then the data will not be as complete and accurate as possible.

[Guest]

On a related note with 175k characters above level 25 I would guess the data now holds a fair bit over half the mains in the game (60-70%).

I figure 325k in retail, maybe 300k sold and actually used, most people have only 1 char, maybe 2 above 25 now and quite a few casual players haven't reached there yet so we wouldn't expect to see more than maybe 250k total above level 25 right now.

[Rollie]

I would agree that is a pretty fair analysis!

[Guest]

WoWcensus.com also tracks the data and I believe has more submissions.

However this sites Data Screen is 100% better and more useful than the ugly mouse-over concept of WoWcensus.com.

[Rollie]

They do have a higher number for total population. One thing you need to remember though, is that we do not track data on characters under level 10. At the time I write this, fully 200k of wowcensus.com's population numbers are for characters 1-10 (according to their overall stats).

Granted, they still have more from 11-60, but the descrapancy isn't as bad as it may first seem.