Posts with tag wow-statistics

Google is the world's largest search engine by a massive margin, enjoying a nearly 70% market share. Google processes over a billion searches every day -- searches for everything from the fate of Firefly to where to buy RPG dice to the answer to the Kirk vs. Picard debate. It even handles searches for non-geeky stuff. And of course, some percentage of those billion daily searches are WoW searches.

Google has a tremendous amount of data about exactly what WoW players are looking for online -- and if there's one thing I can't get enough of, it's WoW data. With the search data that Google makes available, we can get a unique look into how WoW-related searches have changed over time with the changing popularity of the game and what kinds of topics WoW players are searching for more than others. The Google-eye view is a unique insight into the online interest and discussions of World of Warcraft.

While preparing for the raid yesterday, the subject moved from the new Cataclysm info that was announced to statistics -- specifically the statistics tab of the achievements panel. One of our warlocks stated that the Battle for the Undercity ruined his statistics, because his highest hit dealt was over 800k, something that was possible due only to buffs received during the encounter. But then something odd happened. He mentioned his highest heal cast was for 8,785,350hp -- a very odd number for a warlock.

Stranger still, after checking my statistics, I noticed my largest heal cast was for exactly the same number -- and I'm a rogue! One by one people in vent started checking their statistics, and a good two thirds of the raid had the same exact number. 8,785,350. And it didn't seem to matter what class -- plate wearers and cloth casters both had it. It took a while, but we finally managed to figure out the mystery of 8,785,350 and what it meant. So what's your highest heal cast? Is it the magical 8,785,350, or some other amount? How often do you check out your statistics panel, and have you noticed any other strange coincidences with your fellow players?

Over the weekend Thundgot on the EU forums came out and said that the attributes section of the achievements tab will be removed from the game. You can find the attributes section right now by pressing "y" on your keyboard to open up the achievement window, then going to the "Statistics" tab located at the bottom of the window, then the "Character" heading on the left hand side of the window, and finally clicking on the "Attributes" section. Your attributes will look something like the ones above, but much more uber than my priest alt has.

Thundgot makes a point of saying this will improve performance. If you think about it, many of these statistics revolve around "best" or "top" attributes from a character's dataset. Collecting this much information for each character will take a few extra process cycles each time an attribute changes, or each time damage is doled out (since many spells / enchants / procs change these numbers). Multiply this by a few thousand times for a character in a given night (due to potential changes via combat), and then multiply it by around 11 million people playing the game... and you get the picture.