Player count calculations

Community General Discussion
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tl;dr: current “active” accounts is estimated to be around 1.2 million. 31% of which are “raiders” (including “serious LFR”/clearing raiders). Between 41% and 51% are “M+ players” but some of those are just raiders who do M+ because they feel they have to.

“M+ players” presumably have hit each dungeon at least once. Raider io can’t tell us how many characters have hit every dungeon, but that number can’t be more than the count for the lowest dungeon. For season 2 that’s 2,170,846, for season 3 1,535,245. If you split that up to 15+ and < 15 those numbers are 1,055,165/1,092,357 for season 2 and 898,227/615,353 for season 3.

Wowhead says 18% of “profiles” (accounts?) have KSM for season 2 and 15% for season 3. The total number of WoW players then is going to be: # of KSM characters / KSM characters per KSM account / % KSM accounts. The question then is, how many KSM characters are there per KSM account? I think a reasonably safe assumption would be 3 to 5, so for simplicity we’ll say 4.

At 4 KSM characters per KSM account we have 263,791 KSM accounts for season 2, which being 18% gives 1,465,507 total accounts. For season 3, at 4 KSM characters per KSM account it’s 224,557 KSM accounts, at 15% means 1,247,538 total accounts.

So, currently, by these calculations and with the 4 KSM characters per KSM account assumption we arrive at 1,247,538 currently active profiles, however Wowhead counts profiles.

The next question then is, what proportion of the player base “does” M+? We know the number of KSM M+'rs, so the question is how many non-KSM M+'rs are there. As mentioned above, that number would be the number of players completing all dungeons at any level - the number of KSM players. For season 2 that number was 1,092,357 and season 3: 615,353.

So the problem here is, how many accounts are there per non-KSM character? Some of these non-KSM characters will belong to the KSM accounts, and some of these non-KSM characters will be the second, third, fourth, etc. character of a non-KSM account.

Things get involved here so we’ll do season 2 first then season 3. From above, for season 2 the number of KSM accounts is 263,791. Say half of those have a non-KSM character, so 131,896. So non-KSM account characters are 1,092,357 - 131,896 = 960,461.

Now let’s assume that non-KSM players aren’t as enthusiastic about M+ and they only have 2 characters each that do M+ at all. So then the number of accounts that are non-KSM is 960,461 / 2 = 480,231 non-KSM accounts for season 2.

Repeating that for season 3 gives 224,557 KSM accounts / 2 → 112,279 KSM account non-KSM characters, or 615,353 - 112,279 → 503,074 non-KSM account non-KSM characters, or 251,537 non-KSM accounts.

So for season 2 there were 263,791 KSM accounts + 480,231 non-KSM accounts = 744,022 “M+ players”. For season 3 it’s 256,636 + 251,537 = 508,173 “M+ players” for season 3. Proportionately then in season 2 the M+ player base was 744,022 M+ players / 1,465,507 = 50.8%. For season 3 it’s 508,173 / 1,247,538 = 40.7%.

Now for raiding. We’ll do just season 2 so that we give all the “raiders” time to clear SotFO (and get the achievement). Wowhead says 31% of profiles cleared Sanctum on any difficulty. This number includes LFR so the actual number of “raiders” will be less. Given the number of players from above, the number of raiders in season 2 was 1,465,507, so at most 454,307 “raiders”, again some of which will be LFR only.

What is interesting then is that some proportion of the “M+ players” will really be raiders that are doing M+ for gearing for the raid and otherwise would not be doing M+, so debatably are not “M+ players” at all. Just as a guess I’d say 80% or more “serious raiders” (so excluding LFR-only) would be in that “M+ players” number, though the number of M+ characters per account is likely less for raiders than that for “pure” M+ players.

The numbers vary most based primarily on the number of KSM characters per account (we assumed 4) and secondarily on the number of non-KSM characters per account (assuming about 2.27). The more M+ characters per account, the lower the actual populations.

Edit: added commas, thanks

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You think “most” people have 4 players with KSM? lol. Your logic fell apart real early there my friend.

PS thanks for no commas so all of those numbers are really annoying to read.

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What a nerd.

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That was really unnecessarily rude.

Some of us are interested in numbers, some aren’t. Respect to OP for putting so much work into that.

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It’s a joke, champ. lighten up. Eat a snickers. We are all nerds…considering we are on WoW forum talking about video games.

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I enjoyed this.

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The assumption was that KSM players (not “most people”) have 4 characters that run 15+. 1) Everyone on the forum says everything below 15 is easy; 2) anecdotally many of the regular M+ forum posters here have specifically indicated they have many characters that they play, and if they are skilled enough to do 15+ on one they likely are doing it on others (see point #1).

(P.S. thanks for the reminder about commas, fixed)

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Nicely done, but my one caveat is that the streamers always look at m+ & raids for the increase or decrease guesstimate of subs. Always discounting the open world base. Hard to get any accurate datamines from that approach.

We can probably guesstimate ourselves that the game is probably at it’s all time lowest subs. SL isn’t a raving success, but conent drought, and extended time in an expansion is more to blame than anything else.

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Oh no, not math.

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Well, that’s alright then. It’s hard to tell tone from a written comment.

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Yes, the calculations figure out how many M+ players there are and how many raiders there are, and in theory the open-worlders would be whoever is left, but it’s complicated by the fact that there’s overlap between M+ and raiders (which is hard to disentangle because how do you figure out how many are LFR, and also do you say open-worlders strictly do not run LFR?)

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i feel someone failed at math in high school.

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It’s astounding the amount of effort and energy some of you spend on these frivolities.

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I am highly skeptical of you data…but if this is true, then Blizz is still doing really well considering our current content void…

Plus over $15 mil a month in subs in addition to microtransactions would still be a nice paycheck for them

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The actual number of people who raid and do M+ is less than half of what you said.

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First, source?

Second, what a nice necro we have here. Good read even if it may be slightly off base, OP put in some work with his Ti83!