Death Knight Data Goodness

Back in October, we ran a couple articles that gave you a snapshot of the kind of person who played the various classes in World of Warcraft. (I know, in internet time, that was ages ago. If you want to frolic down memory lane, the links are http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/10/17/bartle-gender-and-wow/ and http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/10/24/horde-vs-alliance-data-smackdown/ – enjoy!)

Now that the Death Knight class has been out for nearly three whole months, we figure the flavor of the month kids have had their turn at bat, and the real fans of the new class are settled in. The sample for today’s column is a little more than 500 people, all of whom were active WOW players before the launch, and actively playing their Death Knight. “Actively” as measured by playing sessions – just having one of the new class in the character list isn’t enough to count here.

On with the show:

First, a fun fact: 47% of all Death Knights being played as the primary character are level 80. 77% are 70+. Levels below that are just a tiny number of people at each level, with one odd data point – 7% of primary death knights are at level 64 exactly. Without being a death knight myself, I can’t venture a guess as to any possible causes. I look forward to the comment threads.

Humans and blood elves, what a surprise. In raw numbers, those are the two most popular races for WOW as a whole, so the fact that they are the two most popular races for the Death Knight isn’t a surprise. Even when people are trying to play something as tough and powerful and cool as a DEATH KNIGHT, they still want to be pretty. Admittedly, people seem to care less about being pretty death knights as opposed to other classes – human characters are 38% of the total in the game, and as you can see, DKs are only 24% of the total.

I am told that humans are a popular choice in part because there’s less faction grinding required for the widest possible access to in game goodies. This makes sense, given that the class started life as an alt for most people. And it would explain why the proportion of human characters of the new class is bigger than any other class. One problem with that theory – there is no equivalent faction explanation for Horde that I’m aware of, and the blood elf proportion is even bigger than the human wedge of the pie. So, I’m going back to the pretty theory. I said back in October that even though everyone tries the freak races, they tend to gravitate to human before long… and blood elves are as human as the Horde gets in terms of appearance. This has nothing to do with gender – male players are less concerned than female players about being pretty, in that there are almost no female players with orc characters and only a handful more playing dwarves. But men still want to look good.

This pie shows the gender of the player, not the character. In WOW as a whole the ratio of men to women is still around 4.5 to 1, so the DK (at least as a main character) is definitely skewing to the manly players. Again, not really a shock to anyone.

Each column represents the average number of points spent in each tree by players with a DK as a main. I made the mistake of asking some DKs of my acquaintance to tell me a little more about the different builds. My head exploded. One of the people I spoke with, a former reporter who understands the perils of too much information, suggested I check out an uberguild’s DK forum and provide a link, rather than try to regurgitate it all here: http://elitistjerks.com/f72/

Last, let’s look over the Bartle data. Here’s the breakdown for everyone who has ever taken the Bartle test:

Basically, this represents everyone’s primary stat. So, if you took the quiz and your highest score was in the killer category, you would be represented in the killer pie wedge.

(Side note: These days, everyone wants their hired writer to be sure to include terms in the finished piece that will goose the Google ranking. GamerDNA is hereby claiming the hotly contested KILLER PIE WEDGE search term.)

Now let’s check out the pie for WOW:

Why, I do declare… it’s almost like WOW players make up such a significant part of the pool of users who have taken the Bartle that the results are similar. A single percentage point was subtracted from Explorer and given over to Killer, which, to be honest, kind of makes me giggle. I mean, of all ways for WOW players to deviate from the overall pool, an extra point to “killer” would have been my last guess.

But, as usual, I digress.

Let’s see the pie for Death Knights.

You know that t-shirt that says “Join the Army: Travel the world, meeting interesting people, and kill them”? Apparently that is the official shirt of the typical Death Knight, or at least of the typical player with a Death Knight main.

So, to sum up. A Death Knight is probably a male, the strong silent type who really loves exploring and killing, doesn’t go for the more fantastic race choices that often (but will choose a non-standard race more often than the general WOW player does), and really, really loves the game – because he’s not only got his DK over 70, but his DK is at least his second character.

Your turn! How does your Death Knight deviate from the norm?