Bartle, Gender, and WOW

Last week’s article was such a hit that we decided to take your advice and do it again, with WoW.

Side note: Feel free to send a comment and let us know what other titles you’d like to see. Note that the data for a particular title is more powerful the more DNA profiles we have – so if you want us to cover a game that you play, make sure you’ve got all your friends from that game over here as well. That sounds like dreadfully gratuitous pimping, I know, but the fact is I can’t draw any conclusions from a data pool of forty people, three of them female. So if you play a less than mainstream title, encourage your friends to sign up, and spread the word on fan sites!

Let’s get going. First, the class breakdown overall:

Obviously, this is less meaningful than the WAR chart, as there is no way (from the data we used) to tell how many of the warriors are Horde and how many are Alliance, and so on. Still, the spread is pretty even, ranging from 6% Shaman to 16% Hunter. The latter makes sense given the mechanics of many WoW encounters. In a future column, we’ll try to dig out the breakdown by Alliance/Horde for you. All I can say for certain is that my data shows Alliance outnumbering Horde by a hair under 6%.

Next, let’s look at the gender breakdown (Note: Gender of the actual player, NOT the gender of the in-game character):

Here’s where I really want to see the Alliance/Horde breakdown, because I suspect some of this balance has to do with which races can play which classes, as it did with the WAR classes. These results aren’t quite as insanely skewed as WAR, but we can see that women are drastically more likely to choose a priest – and men are three times more likely to choose the warrior class as women are, according to their proportion of the population.

Until we get that Alliance/Horde breakdown by class, we can get a rough idea by seeing the player gender breakdown by race:

Okay, on some level, you know some poor researcher is googling “race gender issues” for a Serious Project on Important Topics, and he’s going to get here and see “elves” and “undead.” Furthermore, he’s going to discover a segment of society that cares a whole heck of a lot more about Taurens and Orcs than anything he’s researching. And I wish I could see that guy’s face.

But back on topic: I’ve grouped the Alliance races first, followed by Horde. Again we see women going for the sexy and the lovely, while almost totally avoiding the less delicate races. Orcs and dwarves are sadly neglected among women. Men’s preferences are less pronounced with less of a range. I note with amusement that a slightly higher proportion of women than men choose to play… trolls.

By the way, due to the fact that men outnumber women in WoW, the percentage of players who play a human (remember, last week I pointed out that while everyone tries the freak races, they tend to gravitate to human before long) is at 38% of the total playerbase, even as it’s 20% of all men and 19% of all women. This is why you really need to trust the person spouting statistics at you – it’s really easy to slant things.

As a side note related to proportion, there are nearly four and a half times as many men playing WoW as women. WAR’s proportion of women is nowhere near that, which makes sense given the marketing choices of both games. However, to be fair, women are more likely to play an MMO after watching a friend or loved one take up the game. They are also less likely to be early adopters, since they tend to form long term connections and are wary of the cost of forming such bonds in an environment with no proof of longevity. We’ll come back and take another look in a few years to see if the proportion of women climbed at all. I suspect it will.

So, how about Bartle? What is the percentage of users with each predominate “type”?

Well, the proportion of users who primarily identify themselves as killers is lower than in WAR, obviously. I find it fascinating that in WoW, Killers and Achievers are almost exactly even. Explorers have a whopping 39.5% of the pie, leaving 13.4% for Socializers – exactly the same percentage is WAR has.

Now, let’s see which Bartle types prefer what classes:

Wow, nothing like the definite preferences we saw with WAR. Most types have several classes they like, with the exception of the Explorer having a decided liking for the Hunter above the other classes. However, you can see that the Hunter appeals to all of the archetypes quite evenly.

Finally, since we’re waiting for next week to break it down exactly, let’s see how Bartle might predict a player’s choice of Horde or Alliance:

Wow. That tells me… nothing. Well, okay, not NOTHING. I see that killers prefer Horde by 15% over Alliance. The other three types have a slight preference for Alliance. The proportion of each type that enjoys a particular race is remarkably even.

Overall, even if I knew nothing about the game or its history, I would look at these charts and say this is a game that has settled into its groove.

What say you?

Edit 10/20/2008 5:45pm ET

Due to a crash of our chart provider we had to regenerate the charts after a significant number of new tests and it yielded slightly different numbers due to a few thousand more tests because of the WoW insider article. We have adjusted the article to match the new data.

Tags: world of warcraft