How we count
No magic: we read public census pages, keep each source's figures visible and say plainly what a census can and cannot know.
Sources
- ClassicPlus.io — scans of the game uploaded by the site owner (character level, race, class, faction, realm). Publishes race × class counts for all realms, PvE and PvP plus level distribution and a daily trend. Currently 734,805 characters, data of Oct 9.
- WoWCensus — unique characters found in sampled in-game /who scans. Publishes races and classes per realm type, race × class tables, activity windows (24 hours, 7 days) and guild lists. Currently 93,937 characters, data of Oct 7.
- WoW Forever Guides republishes the ClassicPlus.io census with credit. It is listed for transparency but never counted, because counting it would count the same data twice.
Both counted sources are fetched at most once every six hours, with an honest user agent (WoWAP-Census/1.0) and respecting their robots.txt. If a page changes shape or a fetch fails, the last good data stays on screen and is marked as such. Individual character names are never read, stored or shown — only totals.
The consensus
For every figure — a class, a race, a faction, a race × class cell — each source's own share is calculated first (count ÷ that source's own total). The consensus is the plain average of those shares: one source, one vote.
consensus = (shareClassicPlus.io + shareWoWCensus) ÷ 2 · gap = |shareA − shareB| in percentage points (pp)
The gap decides the colour of the dot: up to 1 pp (0.5 pp for race × class cells) — sources agree; up to 2.5 pp (1.2) — close; up to 5 pp (2.5) — they differ; above — they disagree. The bars carry a white tick for ClassicPlus.io and a gold tick for WoWCensus, so you can always see what each source says on its own.
Why sample sizes are not added up or weighted
The sources measure different things. ClassicPlus.io counts every character recorded since the beta opened; WoWCensus counts unique characters in sampled scans. Adding them would double-count the same players, and weighting by sample size would let the biggest source drown out the other — which defeats the purpose of comparing them. When sources disagree, the disagreement is the finding, and we show it.
OLYMPUS
An OLYMPUS guild is a guild on the Alliance side whose name starts with "OLYMPUS". Horde-side guilds with that name and guilds that merely contain the word are namesakes and are not counted. Numbers are characters observed in WoWCensus' public guild lists (top 100 of each list: all realms, PvE and PvP × both factions, Alliance, Horde), de-duplicated per guild, realm and faction. A guild smaller than the last entry of its list is not shown, so every OLYMPUS figure is a lower bound.
The claim "more than 30,000 members across 30+ full guilds" is quoted from Asmongold as reported by NDTV Sports (September 24, 2026). It is his claim; the census neither confirms nor refutes it.
What a census cannot tell
- Characters are not players. Nobody outside Blizzard can see how many accounts or alts stand behind the characters. We do not estimate it.
- Samples are not headcounts. A census only sees characters that were online and scanned.
- No regional split yet. The beta runs on shared realms, so no source can tell US from EU players. The region switch will fill in once launch realms exist.
- It is a beta. Everything changes on November 4, 2026.
Corrections and removal
Spot something wrong, or you run one of the sources and would like to be credited differently — or not used? Write to info@wowap.app and it will be fixed. Source data is also never "cleaned": what you see is what they publish, only compared.