GamerDNA and Massively explore Death Knight demographics

As you can see above, Blood Elves and Humans dominate the race choice in our little group, which seems about right, considering that those are the two most popular races overall. Death Knight players in this study generally tend to have reported themselves as male in real life. And GamerDNA also lays their Death Knights up against the Bartle test and while WoW players trend pretty well to the norm, Death Knights go way more towards the "Killer" and to a lesser extent the "Explorer" end of the scales.
So according to this little survey (and we'll remind you that this is 500 people, so there are plenty of exceptions out there), the average Death Knight is male, chooses whatever race is most familiar to them, and wants to go kill and do damage rather than worry about socializing or achieving. In other words, lots and lots of former Ret Paladins. It'll be interesting to see how this changes over time -- lots of these players are interested in the newest thing, obviously, since they've switched their mains to a new class at the first chance, but as things settle down and more people head back to get new alts, maybe we'll see a different crowd coming out of Acherus.
Filed under: Human, Polls, Analysis / Opinion, Fan stuff, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Blood Elves, Classes, Death Knight






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Remen Jan 14th 2009 5:06PM
Damn Overload of DK's
Houston Jan 14th 2009 5:43PM
They're new. What did you expect? Get over it.
AyaJulia Jan 14th 2009 5:06PM
Why not just visit warcraftrealms.com? They have a sample size of over 600,000, based on volunteers who run their addon and take automated /who samples while they play.
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?class=Death%20Knight
Jane Gray Jan 15th 2009 3:17AM
It doesn't have the self reporting gender features that this site uses.
epic Jan 15th 2009 10:24AM
or farm the armory be.imba does it why not ask them for the handy api
Muse Jan 14th 2009 5:11PM
I can testify that orc Death Knights are a bit on the rare side. Spent hours looking for one for the Winter Veil achievement.
Zul Jan 14th 2009 6:42PM
Well it is obvious the Horde is completely dominated by blood elves... Like thats a shock.
TBH I do not see what is so appealing about them.
kabshiel Jan 14th 2009 9:56PM
To be fair, Blood Elves and Undead would be the populous DK races in the lore, since Silvermoon and Lordaeron were the kingdoms most affected (ie. wiped out) by the Scourge.
Stormwind Humans, Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, Dwarves, and Night Elves would be on the second tier, since they're homelands weren't totally trashed, but they did have many encounters with the Scourge on three continents.
Gnomes would be on the third tier, since they didn't participate in the Third War.
Draenei would be the least populous DK race, since they only showed up on Azeroth an hour and half ago.
Sharkhunt Jan 15th 2009 12:43PM
@ "TBH I do not see what is so appealing about (Blood Elves)"
---
Arcane torrent has nice synergy with strangulate and mind freeze in PvP and is another source of runic power in PvE to help keep gargoyle up if you have to jump back to range for some reason.
kozom Jan 14th 2009 5:17PM
WHAT??? Not overun with gnomes? People were just mindlessly QQing??? UNHEARD OF!!!
Kirk Jan 14th 2009 5:15PM
As stated above 500 is a small sample size.
While in my experience the data above is correct in regards to Blood Elves, I find nearly as many Orc DKs (their racials are among the best for the class, especially Unholy builds.)
I don't play alliance, but the number of humans isn't suprising. What is suprising is the relatively small number of night elves, given their flamboyant 2h animation.
Firazz Jan 14th 2009 5:30PM
*sigh*
500 is a perfectly good sample size assuming that the sample is representative and you are not cherry-picking for trivial correlations. There really is no absolute rule of thumb regarding sample size. 24 may be good for one study, and 50,000 may be not enough for another study.
Rtiptidez Jan 14th 2009 5:17PM
umm, this was posted 4 hours ago in "Last Week on Massively: "...slow news day eh?
Alchemistmerlin Jan 14th 2009 5:52PM
"Slow news day" is code for "I'm an insufferable git"
pietrex Jan 14th 2009 5:20PM
The DK races I find the most frequently are (in order) Blood Elves, Humans, Orcs and Undead. I'm surprised there are so few Gnomes. And however little this survey may be, I think it reflects the reality (at least on my realm) quite well.
Tumleren Jan 14th 2009 6:55PM
I was also surprised to see such a small number of gnomes.. I'd expected there to be tons! I know I got my own female with pink hair and ponytails
SeanOr101 Jan 14th 2009 5:22PM
Haha,
I dig the hack at Ret pally's
retron Jan 14th 2009 5:58PM
At ret pally's what?
Woolwort Jan 14th 2009 5:23PM
“In other words, lots and lots of former Ret Paladins.”
Mike…bubie, When are your going to give up your fixation with ret. pallies? Don’t be hatin’.
Kiristo Jan 14th 2009 6:40PM
They finally made us able to kill things ourselves and then they made what we (I at least) always wanted, something that can kill well nad heal itself at the same time (blood DK) like we did in Diablo II. I still blame Diablo for making me lvl a paladin back in vanilla wow. Damn, that took a long time.