(Note to readers: We will be updating this blog with this kind of column every other Friday for the foreseeable future. Thanks for hanging in there with me while we figure out the best plans of attack!)

If you play WoW, chances are that you know someone who stayed home from work or school on launch day for Wrath of the Lich King, just to make progress on the brand new levels. You may even see that person in the mirror every day, and you know you should be embarrassed but you’re totally not.

We took a look at a sample of our WoW players from the launch of Lich King until now, just to see how the leveling went. Come along and see how the ponies ran.

First, as always, let me define the sample. There are more than three thousand people in our sample today. This is not a truly random sample, because everyone in it had to have a level 70 character at the time that WOTLK launched. (We ruled out people who played Death Knights as their main, because a) there weren’t very many, b) they started at 55, so comparing how fast they got to 80 to characters starting at 70 wasn’t fair, and c) any class with that much “new shiny” isn’t going to be a good comparison to the old classes.) Finally, to make the comparisons as fair as possible, we only included people who got the expansion in the first ten days. Leveling up in a newly opened area is a different kettle of fish from leveling in an area that doesn’t have a giant glut of humanity.

So, how long did it take?

Fortunately for my sanity, the bulk of players – 44% – took between 16 and 30 days to go those ten big levels. More importantly, the straight up average number of days given the whole sample was 29 days. It’s good to know that the average user in our sample took bathroom breaks occasionally.

However, we can’t say that for 18% of the users in our sample who managed the maxing out trick in less than two weeks. EIGHTEEN PERCENT, y’all. Sure, the sample wasn’t random, and we looked at people who were at the cap and bought the expansion as soon as they could. Sure, the sample is therefore slightly biased towards the higher end of the casual to uber scale. But really, people. Two weeks? That’s a lot of used vacation time there, because I don’t care how casual friendly WoW is, you don’t go ten levels in less than two weeks with just an hour or two in the evenings.

All right. If we broke down each of those pie wedges by class, what would we see? Let’s start by refreshing our memories as to what the class breakdown across the population for WoW (pre-Death Knight) looked like:

Okay, now let’s see the new numbers:

Note: The pie wedge colors don’t match. Sorry. If I had endless amounts of time, I’d go back and make the old chart match the new charts, but meanwhile, just make the adjustment in your head.

That is interesting as all get out. The crazy people who probably peed into empty Red Bull cans at their desks are evenly spread across the classes. There’s no one class that leaps out at you as being particularly fast at the level game.

The other three leveling speeds look more like our class breakdown chart, but not exactly. The distribution is far more even than I would have expected. Clearly, in WoW, there isn’t a particular class that sucks up all the minmaxing leveling junkies.

Ah, but is there a race that is most efficient? Here are the pies:

As with the class spread, the spread among races was not nearly as wide in the group of players who raced to 80. I find the pie for the most typical leveling speed to be the most interesting – you’ve got your two big clumps for the two most popular races, which makes sense – but a very even racial distribution across the board for the rest. The slower leveling groups reverted to closer to the proportions found in the actual population.

Finally, is there a class/race combo that did the Lich King levels in record time?

I’m not seriously suggesting we analyze that chart. I just think it’s neat.

I took the liberty of removing every class/race combo where none of the four time frames got even two percent of the total sample. We are talking about very small raw numbers of people, and I’d be concerned about trying to assume too much. You can get out a magnifying glass and look at the big chart if you’re that curious.

A bunch of class race combos had the majority of its players max out in the first two weeks: Tauren Druid and Shaman, Night Elf Priest and Rogue, the Undead Priest, Rogue, and Warlock, Human Priest. The Human Paladins and the Night Elf Druids both had the majority of their members finishing in the third group. And most of the Night Elf Hunters finished the race way behind the curve… or perhaps Night Elf Hunter players are too smart to bother racing? Who knows?

You can’t look at this chart and truly determine the most efficient leveling combination, because the results of this bar chart reflect how popular a particular race is. But you can certainly see within each group how fast a particular combination was able to max out.

All right – over to you. Any surprises? How close to “normal” were you in the horse race? Do you think the horse race was kind of silly, or is it always worth it to max out as soon as possible? Most importantly… did you actually pee in an empty Red Bull can at any point, and if so… why?