I know class/race popularity has been discussed a lot on this forum, but in the past we only had data from private servers and surveys. I have found a site with the census of beta and stress tests combined which might be truer to reality.

Check it out and let me know what you think: https://wowclassicpopulation.com/
Don't forget to click 'Characters' tab in top right-hand corner.

This might also be true, but like with all statistics they change alot from tests/surveys until the actual launch. People might have tried a class of interest on the stress tests and then feel that it's absolutely not what they had in mind and will play on live.

Imagine if blizzard themselves actually made a poll where you choose faction and class and a not decided option. I think majority of players would participate and we would perhaps see the "truest" form of statistics before release.

Imagine 2m+ on a poll. Again even though poll statistics show one thing, it might change last second.

But overall stress test statistics could prove being very accurate.

Erik wrote: ↑

5 years ago

This might also be true, but like with all statistics they change alot from tests/surveys until the actual launch. People might have tried a class of interest on the stress tests and then feel that it's absolutely not what they had in mind and will play on live.

Imagine if blizzard themselves actually made a poll where you choose faction and class and a not decided option. I think majority of players would participate and we would perhaps see the "truest" form of statistics before release.

Imagine 2m+ on a poll. Again even though poll statistics show one thing, it might change last second.

But overall stress test statistics could prove being very accurate.

Its not only stress test data, it also has most characters from the previous beta realms. So you should get a pretty good idea what people are expected to play when you filter by beta realms and lvl40 only: https://wowclassicpopulation.com/charac ... Beta%20PvP

Alliance are 42% human. Horde are 37% undead. This is pretty close to what we have seen from retail vanilla, private server and the projections for Classic. The Alliance/Horde ratio is less important because while the split seems wonderful now, having a ton of different servers will obviously create imbalances everywhere. Many servers will be dominated by one faction. I cant see any of this changing. Racials on PvP servers will be slightly favored towards strong PvP racials, and PvE servers will slight shift towards PvE racials.

When you start playing with functions to see which classes make it to a higher level, classes like warrior fall off a bit. We are seeing the same for hunter, but this is likely due to the poor state of hunters in the beta.

As always, servers will trend towards one faction or the other. Most players will choose racials based on performance or their perceived performance. The races that were always popular will continue to be popular. Lots of people will say they want to roll classes like warrior, but will tucker out quite quickly and abandon their toon. Other trends still remain, like 10% of alliance playing locks, to 12% on horde. This difference will be magnified as players realize the disadvantages associated with rolling an alliance warlock in PvP and this will be magnified on PvP servers where players care more about PvP.

This is also a tough metric to use because the Classic beta occurred with strange level restrictions and the stress tests are composed of throw-away characters, so classes that can bloom quickly were blocked at random intervals. Players who want to go fast and play hard were arbitrarily stopped (for the sake of the beta) and this wont be the case in Classic. Needless to say, nothing new here. We're seeing the exact same trends. Trends that will likely be increased as content creators reinforce the meta and players seek to excel as they learn more and more about the game. If Blizz chooses to launch fresh servers occasionally and Classic carries on for a significant period of time, we will slowly get closer and closer to the numbers we seen on private where the meta is held in a higher regard by players who had repeated the content several times.

I think it's important to note that while this consensus is a good starting point, it will not be a good representation of the actual Classic experience.

We are collecting census data from the World of Warcraft: Classic realms (currently beta & stress tests) with the help of an ingame addon [...]

• First of all, obviously this is not ALL the people that has played Classic.
• Secondly, this data is from relatively a very small amount of people got into the Beta. This will not be a good representation of the general public when Classic actually launches.
• A very great deal of people who play WoW are not on forums, wowhead, mmo-champion, reddit, or barrens.chat. Their active users COMBINED still didn't even make up 10% of the entire WoW playerbase (when it was still being reported by Blizzard).

So with that out of the way, lets analyze some of the statistics on Characters.

Levels

• Beta realms organically leveled up to max level of 40. I will leave out AV results by applying a filter of 1-40.

Races and horde:ally ratio

• 49% Allience:51% Horde. This is reliable information. WoW has consistently made the 2 functions more or less equal.
• Humans winning the majority of Ally races. This is reliable information, as official WoW statistics has always shown humans to be most popular choice.
• Undead winning the majority of Horde races. [x] doubt.

Class ratio comments, in line with private servers

• Tier 1: Warriors being the top race. I think a majority of players trying out warrior are doing just that. Trying it out. Everyone tells stories of how horrible warrior leveling is, so people are leveling them to see if that's correct. Private server influence is probably shown here, as in general most private servers have warriors at top percentage.
• Tier 2: Hunter/mage/rogue make the 2nd most popular class with similar percentages. They are popular for many reasons, being good dps (rogue/mage) and ease of play (hunter) is certainly a role here.
• Tied to tier 2 when combined: Paladin and shaman are 7% and 8% respectively, but since they are ally:horde specific, combined they are as common as the other top 2 tiers.
• Tier 3: Priest and Warlock. They are the best healers and have a 10% popularity rate. Warlocks are just above 10%.
• Druid being the lowest ratio is in line with private server statistics.

So while the class ratio is in line with private server statistics, I really think we should take these with a huge grain of salt. These statistics are a small portion of a small portion of a dedicated playerbase. I can guarantee that many warriors will quit before 60. A lot more people will be playing druid, not just 7-8%. There are just so many people out there who are not influenced by private servers or tier guides or what is best, and if the quarter of people who are interested in Classic sticks around after 3 months, the final distribution will be wildly different than what is shown here.

Gallow wrote: ↑

5 years ago

Beta realms organically leveled up to max level of 40. I will leave out AV results by applying a filter of 1-40.

this kind of skews things. if you only use the beta realms where you could hit lvl 40 (classic beta pvp + pve) you get a 65/35 ally/horde split.

however, if you only use the stress test realms (classic realms 2, 3, 12, and 15) you get a 39/61 ally/horde split. so.... kinda the opposite

what's really interesting though is that if you show only max-level characters (lvl 40 for beta and lvl 15 for stress test), the ratios are identical, 55/45 ally/horde for both. so the numbers kind of work out anyway, but i think the faction numbers are the least reliable of the census data. i imagine the people rolling alliance just to hang out with asmongold or esfand would cause a noticeable jump all on their own.

i agree with the rest of @Gallow's post, except for doubting that undead will be the #1 horde race. if orcs could be priests and mages....

33 more days lads. Can't wait for all this talk about 'what will happen' to shift towards 'it's here now and its brilliant.'

I have always been surprised by how balanced things are between Horde and Alliance in general. And even the spread between different classes are within a few % points of each other. There isn't any one class that is so broken that nobody plays it. Sure there are a lot of broken specs, but Blizz did a good job of making all the classes compelling enough for people to at least be playing them.