I’m wanting to run some analyses on the population of WoW characters. I figured the easiest thing to do is to collect a random sample of active players. Is there any straightforward way of doing this? My current idea is to generate a list of “seed” characters, get the rosters of the guilds they are members of, and then use those members as the basis for my analysis. There are a number of issues with that approach, however, and I wanted to know if there is a better way of doing it that I’m unaware of. Is it, for example, possible to get data from all characters providing you stay within the API call limits?
Not exactly random, you can however use the PvP/Raid/M+ leaderboard APIs to get the best players of a realm on each of those categories and follow their guilds.
Depending on the analysis you want to perform this won’t help much, as most casual players (or small guilds) on high population servers won’t make it to top of the leaderboards.
No, it is not possible. There is no way to obtain the entire population of a realm through the API.
People used to follow AH dumps to track active character population, and it was very reliable. Since the AH does not include the seller name anymore the only endpoints left are the leaderboards.
Thanks for clarifying. Sounds like I’ll end up doing some pseudo-random thing like getting the leaderboards then.