How we count

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.
• Olympus Guild addon (by dnl_gentile, MIT licence) — a crowd-sourced census that runs inside the game: one elected reporter per guild shares the guild's size, online count, class mix, level spread and five highest levels, and every client adds the guilds up. A volunteer's computer passes those totals to this site; nothing else leaves the game — no chat, no accounts, no logs. Currently 75,296 soldiers on the Alliance side (PvP realms 70,971 + PvE realm 4,325). Until the automatic feed runs around the clock, the figure is read by hand from the addon's census header by the site's editor, and shown with the realm and the time it was read; the newer of a reading and a feed delivery always wins.
• 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.

The two public sources are fetched every four hours, around the clock, 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. Character names are never read from the public sources. The only names on this site come from the Olympus addon reports (the Hall of Heroes: the highest levels per class); they are filtered for offensive names and removed on request.

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 = (share_{ClassicPlus.io} + share_WoWCensus) ÷ 2  ·  gap = |share_A − share_B| 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 claims quoted on the Olympus page are quoted with their source and date; they are his claims, and the census neither confirms nor refutes them. The page shows five different numbers on one ladder, because they answer different questions:

• Counted in-game — the sum of the guild sizes the Olympus addon census reports (each guild capped at 1,000, only guilds heard from within a day). There is one census per faction and realm group, so the figure is only complete when both the PvP and the PvE realms have reported; until the PvP realms have, the page says so and does not use it as the headline.
• Maximum potential — the number of guilds times the 1,000-member guild limit. A ceiling, not a count.
• Scaled census estimate — OLYMPUS' share of the characters WoWCensus surveyed, applied to all Alliance characters ClassicPlus.io has recorded, PvP and PvE separately. A floor, because scans miss offline characters.
• The King's claim — quoted, never recalculated.
• Seen by the public census sites — the characters WoWCensus caught in its scans of OLYMPUS guilds.

The players-and-alts table is plain arithmetic (characters divided by an assumed number of characters per player); it is not a measurement.

What a census cannot tell

• Characters are not players. Nobody outside Blizzard can see how many accounts or alts stand behind the characters. The Olympus page only shows the arithmetic for a range of assumptions.
• Samples are not headcounts. A census only sees characters that were online and scanned.
• No regional split. The beta is one shared environment hosted in the US that players from Europe and the Americas join together, so no source can tell US from EU players — Blizzard's developer calls it "one REGIONAL realm" (Eurogamer) and PC Gamer reports the servers "appear to be located solely in the US". What the beta separates is the realm type, PvE or PvP. A regional split will appear 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.