So I went down a rabbit hole exploring the forums’ backend data (all publicly accessible, nothing shady) and found some interesting stuff. Thought I’d share because a couple of things genuinely surprised me…
Trust Level 3 is incredibly rare
| Trust Level | Users |
|---|---|
| TL0 | 805,375 |
| TL1 | 152,653 |
| TL2 | 27,818 |
| TL3 | 291 |
But here’s the twist: the TL3 list includes Blizzard staff (developers, moderators, CS, CMs, etc.) who get TL3 granted as part of their role. When you filter those out, the number of community members who earned TL3 organically drops to roughly 20-25 people out of 805,375 registered accounts. And of those, only ~15 are currently active users.
Every post has a hidden engagement score
In the thread data, each post has a hidden “score” field that Discourse calculates based on multiple variables. It’s not the same as likes, since a post can have likes but a low score or vice versa depending on how fast the engagement came and from whom.
For reference, the first thread in my feed as I write this (Freja Changes in Stadium) has a score of 27.2. The latest Director’s take (Director's Take: Sunrise in Gibraltar) has a score of 6,591.2. Spotlight’s blog post (Overwatch Spotlight: The Reign of Talon Begins) has 21,637.8.
How to see for yourself
Basically, if you add .json to the end of any thread or public user profile URL, you get the raw data that the forum uses to render the page. It’s not hidden or secret, it’s just the API (from Discourse) that powers what we see. But it contains way more info than the UI shows us.
When you see a wall of raw data, use Ctrl+F to search for the terms (“score”, “trust”, or anything else you want).
