Warhammer Online Population Balance: Things are evening out!
August 26, 2008 – 6:40 pmAn extremely keen reader of our site just informed me that Warhammer Alliance is running a new career poll and that he has set up a spreadsheet to track and analyze all the results. Great job, Napox!
The most interesting thing of all is that the population seems to be balancing out with 53% choosing Destruction and 47% choosing Order careers. My analysis of the previous poll showed that you can’t make blanket statements about how things will play out at release based on these types of polls, however, we can compare this poll to the previous one.
Here’s a link to Napox’s older spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p2RqwCxSG1nvY1eLRbKlDcg. A quick numbers comparison shows that there are quite a few more people who want to play Order today than there were only a couple months ago! The previous poll had Destruction at 59% and Order at 41%. That’s a drop of 6% in Destruction population, which is really a 12 point spread difference!
Napox went so far as to make us some amazing charts, which I’ve been given permission to share with you here. So far, there have been over 3700 respondents to the poll. Update: One day and 300 respondents later, the results are still 53/47!
This is a detailed breakdown of all careers across the board. As we can clearly see, the Shaman is the most popular and the high elf White Lion is the least popular. Surprisingly, the dwarfs are doing quite well for themselves! Maybe that’s because an IB + RP is the nastiest combo in the game? Also of note, the Magus and White Lion aren’t very popular, which could be a result of a lack of marketing until only recently. The other classes we knew almost nothing about were cut from the game a couple months back.
Here we can see that Destruction only has a 6% lead! For each % Destruction loses, Order gains 2 towards a balance. This is a much different picture than we saw in June…
Here’s a realm breakdown. Greenskins and Chaos are still in the lead, but not by much. This isn’t surprising since these two realms are the poster boys of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning marketing and are arguably the most popular in the tabletop game as well.
This table breaks everything down for you, nice and easy. If you’re like me who hasn’t taken a Calculus class in almost a decade, here’s a quick definition of Standard Deviation:
Formulated by Galton in the late 1860s,[1] the standard deviation remains the most common measure of statistical dispersion, measuring how widely spread the values in a data set are. If many data points are close to the mean, then the standard deviation is small; if many data points are far from the mean, then the standard deviation is large. If all data values are equal, then the standard deviation is zero. A useful property of standard deviation is that, unlike variance, it is expressed in the same units as the data. ~WIKIPEDIA
Destruction may have the three most popular careers, but it also has two of the three least popular careers.
Here’s a breakdown of each career archetype. I’d say this is pretty balanced with what you’d find in most MMORPGs. I would also wager that the Support archetype is so large because it is made up of six careers, which is two more than MDPS and Tanks. The same goes for Ranged DPS. I believe Melee DPS and Tanks are suffering a little bit because there were four of these career-types cut from release a short time ago.
Everything seems pretty normal here. The Black Orc slice is larger than the Swordmaster slice because even though these careers share the same mechanic, Greenskins are more popular than High Elves. Greenskins also only have three careers to choose from, while High Elves have four. Chosen and Ironbreakers are almost dead even.
The spread is a bit larger here because we have so many careers to choose from. Again, while the Shaman and Archmage share the same mechanic, there is a big difference due to realm popularity and career options. The Warrior-Priest and Disciple of Khaine are relatively close and the Runepriest and Zealot are almost dead even. Interesting to note is that the damage-focused support careers are more popular than the straight up healers. Looks like Mythic had a good idea when they decided to present us with these options!
As opposed to the tanks, where we have four options and the spread is fairly even, Melee DPS is a different story. The Marauder is immensely more popular than the Witch Elf on the Destruction side. This could be because WEs are female-only and the majority of WAR players will undoubtedly be male IRL. It could also be because the Marauders are more straight-up Melee DPS with several mutations that increase their versatility, while the WE is a more rogue-like class. Marauders are unquestionably more durable.
The Witch Hunter is quite a bit more popular than the White Lion on the Order side as well, which is interesting because it has the same mechanic as the Witch Elf. I believe the White Lion suffers from being a pet class, being a High Elf (four careers to choose from), and being marketed to fans so late in the PR game. On the other hand, the Witch Hunter is a very recognizable career for anyone even remotely interested in WAR (he even has his own Comic book). It also has some nice ranged abilities and was long considered “overpowered” in beta. Only having Altdorf and the Inevitable City in the game at release may also have something to do with it’s popularity, as it belongs to the realm of Empire.
Again, there is a fairly large spread amongst ranged DPS careers because there are six to choose from as opposed to four. The three pet classes are the least popular of the bunch, which isn’t overly surprising. The Bright Wizard and Sorceress glass cannons (huge firepower, little defense) are up there but I’m a little shocked that Bright Wizards aren’t more popular in this poll because I see so many of them in beta. The Shadow Warrior is a hybrid ranged/melee DPS so I would guess it is very popular due to its versatility. Oh, and the Legolas factor (nyuk nyuk). Surprisingly, Order trumps Destruction in RDPS popularity by a score of 53% to 46% (we seem to have lost a percent to rounding).
Conclusions
This may only show us where Warhammer Alliance forum members are falling in the grand scheme of things, but I will go out on a limb and say that I believe Order is gaining in popularity and will continue to do so until the game finally launches. I doubt we’ll ever see perfect balance on any WAR server at release, but I think this bodes much better than the previous results.
Many people believe, myself included, that the majority of more casual gamers favour the “good guys” in MMORPGs. The rising popularity of Order, as illustrated by this poll, may prove this to be the case because WAR’s audience has been shifting from the hardcore audience to the mainstream audience lately. Everyone in the preview weekend would be considered a fan of WAR since they preordered a copy of the game, however, I would argue that they are generally less hardcore than the people who have been following this game for the past few years.
Once the NDA was lifted, a massive influx of new people or people who were only casually following WAR’s progress started to take notice. Hell, my blog traffic has tripled since last week! With the NDA up and 50,000 participants in the preview weekend, I believe people are now basing their career choices on more facts than fiction. When the NDA was still in place, people were basing their choices on the ideas of each career, based on whatever little information Mythic released.
We still can’t be exactly sure how things will work out at release, but this poll definitely lifts my spirits. I truly hope for balanced servers or an Order bias because I am set on rolling a greenskin and I DO NOT want to be in the overpopulated realm. My fingers are crossed.
Thanks again to Napox! He rox! 
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Post tags: dwarfs, EA Mythic, greenskins, opinions, Warhammer Online
44 Responses to “Warhammer Online Population Balance: Things are evening out!”
While I have no real evidence, I am pretty certain that Order will out number Destruction. Maybe not on every server, but overall they probably will.
BTW WAR ran fine this weekend on my computer except for some disconnects to the login screen though I’m pretty sure it was the servers and not my problem.
By travis on Aug 26, 2008
Great article! This is what I thought would happen - there are plenty of people who will move to the less populous side. There will be imbalances by server and at times, of course, but things will work out.
By Ardwulf on Aug 26, 2008
I’d bet you $1000 if the Choppa was still in the game Black Orc popularity would be much lower. There were plenty of people who only rolled a Black Orc because it was the only orc class.
By Bo on Aug 26, 2008
@Bo - Agreed!
I definitely see the shift in Order popularity as we move closer to release. A friend of mine who has been in beta since May 2007 gave me this little anecdote:
Back when he first started, Destruction was overpopulating Order by 500+ to 50 on the test servers, but as the testing audience has grown, so has Order’s population.
By Snafzg on Aug 26, 2008
The removal of those melee classes really hurt, a lot. They need to get those classes into the game ASAP. It’s just crucial for balance.
I laughed at all the people freaking out, and continue to do so, because I’ve been around way too long and all the hysteria was so pathetic.
Nice to see some numbers and charts though. Love this post.
By ScytheNoire on Aug 26, 2008
Great info! Thanks!
By Suchey on Aug 26, 2008
Interesting numbers, but, as always, people who are visiting one particular site a month before the game launches may not represent a random sample of the population at large.
Part of the lag factor on the White Lion may be the novelty of the melee pet class. Ordinarily one thinks of the pet tanking a bit while the owner does DPS, but the White Lion can actually spec to tank for his pet instead of the other way around. And hey, Blood Elf Hunters are pretty popular, so I don’t think there will be shortages of Lions in game.
By Green Armadillo on Aug 26, 2008
An interesting analysis and breakdown.
A couple of thoughts about the conclusions, though I definitely appreciate the work that is involved in this.
I think people are too hung up on lost/missing classes as “the reason” for a lot of things, and true, it may shift things around by a couple percents (especially for the tanks), but I think it is more game design than anything else for the melee dps (as well as tank design — decent dps but a lot more flexibility). Lots of standoffs in PUG groups where melee has to wait for someone else to make a move or suicide it. I think that will change as people start to adjust tactics and/or play with their guild. Though, regardless of how many classes there would be or how much tactics improve, I’d still predict that melee will always be the lowest under current game design.
Tanks…Part of it, I think is simple appearence. I think part of the prob with high elf is that some people are still stuck in the traditional thoughts on what a tank should be (ironbreaker wins vs. swordmaster). Along with that, the black orc and chosen just look amazing and more intimidating than either. Finally, I think, even though i will probably be playing a swordmaster, that people just have a tough time wrapping their head around it as a tank in general.
Preview weekend hurt the popularity of the WL thanks to “sweet” pet pathing (and maybe the squig herder too?). I saw a lot of people say they weren’t going to play the WL because of that (or at least not as their first class). I found that a silly reason, but it is, at the very least, a class that people didn’t stick with since they didn’t want to fight it and then got interested in something else. Or, they simply read the negative threads on it. Of course, it could just be that WAR Alliance community isn’t into the pet classes (as you mention)
I too was shocked by the witch elf, but I think their low numbers could be due to popularity of the dark elf disciple. They could be suffering from the lack of a tank (ok here the cut class may be a difference), too making it starting area rvr etc, especially as a melee dps, and while the same argument could be made about Empire, I’ve seen a lot of dwarves and elves there, and not so much the other way around.
Otherwise, very cool analysis and I had a lot of fun looking through it.
By AW on Aug 26, 2008
tl;dr
Pops are finally evening out yeah
By Medrin on Aug 26, 2008
I did a survey of all the online polls and the population is evening out. Destruction is now only leading 59% to 41%.
Pretty Interesting. Also interesting is the popularity of tanks and healers.
http://waaaghhammer.com/2008/08/26/poll-summary-order-vs-destruction/
By Draegan on Aug 26, 2008
@BO
Not really, I made spreadsheets a while ago for the first WA poll as well (with all the 24 classes)
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p2RqwCxSG1nvY1eLRbKlDcg
You can see that the Black Orc was a popular class even without the help of the Choppa players.
IMO most of the Choppa players will choose other melee dps classes.
@AW
I was shocked as you by the low number of the witch elves, I thought all Warcraft rogues will rush to play it.
By napox on Aug 26, 2008
Awesome work Napox (and Snafzg!). I think it’s turning into one of those guessing games though, it’ll be affected also by server type and those who’ve switched specifically to be on the more underpopulated side - who then may need to switch back).
I see them ending up fairly equal on some servers, unbalanced on others. I don’t really mind which I’m on though!
By arbitrary on Aug 27, 2008
i don’t know what kind of poll this is unless everyone in that poll is from 1 server…
should have a poll for what server/career they are going.
from gathering information on guilds and how many members signed up. it seems destruction is going to over run order. but then again who knows.. not everyone prepares to join a guild before release… also there are probably a few who signs up to more than one guild.
someone make one with server/side!! should have a better view on what server is going to have what zergs
By itzzzdae on Aug 27, 2008
Nice work!
When playing the Beta/preview weekend I did get the feeling that Order had a better “casual” community. I often saw people helping each other more healing stranges, helping people in need ot they die etc. On Desctruction i died a couple of times to adds and had a Descution player standing next to me to busy doing emotes
Now im not saying this happens all the time but it made me think that as you said Order have more casual gamers who are not obsessed with getting to lvl 40 now! or getting all the best loot. I think desctruction has more hard core gamers and there for a different type of community. but then again I could be all wrong 
By Bleak on Aug 27, 2008
Wow, that post was full of grammar errors… Thems the breaks when you don’t proof read after a long day at work!
@Draegan - I don’t think it’s necessarily proper to use a guild-specific survey in your polling numbers because guilds tend to show a bias because they are usually made up of like-minded people. Nice number crunch though!
@Napox - I know certain people are rolling a Black Orc solely because it’s now the only Orc career in the game and they were originally set on the Choppa. I don’t think it affected it majorly, but it had some effect.
@Arbitrary - Definitely a guessing game. We won’t know how things will truly play out until the later stages of open beta imho when there are many more people playing the game. Even then, a release senario could be different.
@Itzzzdae - Would you like to see a poll between Destruction and Order on the Open RvR, Core, and RP servers? Unfortunately, we don’t have these numbers, but I would wager that Destruction would be > on Open RvR, both will be close to balanced on Core, and Order will be > on RP. Just guesses though…
@Bleak - Your comment made me think of a couple different things:
1) Alliance had larger numbers in WoW and I wonder if we’ll see more people rolling Destruction because so many WoW players want to see a change of scenery (the evil side).
2) Whichever realm ends up with the most players will also end up with the most “noobs.” I hate calling them that, but Alliance was huge in WoW, but a large portion of that population was ultra casual and not overly talented at playing the game.
By Snafzg on Aug 27, 2008
BTW, and I know this isn’t the right place for wheeling at this particular windmill, but I hate the phrase support class.
Support classes are the backbone of any MMO group. It sounds like the assumption is that everyone else exists to serve the all-mighty dps.
The dps just pew pew. Its the tanks and the healers that are doing the hard part.
/rant.
By Toxic on Aug 27, 2008
Hehe, I guess it depends on how you look at it. Without sufficient DPS you will rarely beat an enemy and technically it’s the healer’s job to “support” the DPS guys out there who would quickly die without assistance. The DPSers aren’t supporting the healers; the tanks are, so I guess tanks are “support” too!
That said, without sufficient healing and tank support, you will rarely beat an enemy either.
By Snafzg on Aug 27, 2008
Here’s another statistics people have been speculating about:
Faction / Tank / Healer / MDPS / RDPS
Order / 23% / 32% / 14% / 31%
Destruction / 25% / 37% / 14% / 24%
According to these numbers the Order side is a little bit more DPS heavy, but the ratios are still within reasonable bounds.
By NihilisticAplomb on Aug 27, 2008
“Many people believe, myself included, that the majority of more casual gamers favour the “good guys” in MMORPGs.”
Sorry, but that opinion really has no iota of reality in it. I have yet to see any real fact to support casual gamers tend to be more “good” than “evil”. I am sure you can find as many casual “evil” players as you would find “good” players. You can just as easily say that casual people play mmo’s to de-stress themselves and just play an “evil” character so they can let their inhibitions go. Making such unsupported statements only tend to perpetuate elitist attitudes. Not saying that you have one, just that such statements are easily misconstrued.
I’m a casual gamer in the closed beta and have played both sides. I like playing multiple characters so I’ll probably be playing most of the classes available. And when I do start playing the Shadow Warrior, please don’t say its because of the Legolas factor >__<.
By TC on Aug 27, 2008
@TC - Don’t get me wrong, I’m an ultra casual gamer in terms of hours played per week and I always prefer the Evil side, so I’m a proven contradiction to my original statement. I meant it in a more general sense.
In every MMORPG and MUD I’ve played, the “good” guys always outnumber the “bad” guys. From what I’ve gathered, the “good” guys were also more casual.
By casual, I mean that they aren’t necessarily hardcore about the world, lore, or gameplay mechanics. I don’t really mean that they log in less time per week than hardcores, per say.
By Snafzg on Aug 27, 2008
Wow. Great post. I’ve been dreading the imbalance and I hope that things do come out to be more balanced. I’m partial to the dark side characters and don’t want to get stomped just because we lack numbers. I can’t wait to throw a heal your way in game.
By Tim on Aug 27, 2008
@Snafzg - About the “good” guys outnumbering the “bad” guys, I generally agree with you, since I’ve usually rolled the trolls, ogres, and other ugly races in games like EQ and such because seeing one was really rare, but I’m wondering if its less true now then before. It seems “bad” is “in” nowadays, at least my impression of it is. Of course, I have no hard facts to back it up, just my overall feeling by reading different forums and such.
Of course, we have no real way to know how population balance will turn out, but I hope there’s enough parity so everyone can enjoy whatever character they want to play. ^^
By TC on Aug 27, 2008
P.S.
@Snafzg - “I’m an ultra casual gamer” Isn’t that an oxymoron? lmao.^^
By TC on Aug 27, 2008
@TC - Me too! Hehe, I guess that is a bit of an oxymoron…
By Snafzg on Aug 27, 2008
I’d expect the classes to change around over time. In beta a lot of players try out a variety of classes to get a feel for them. I’d also expect that the current crowd playing is only the beginning, and that once non pvp people find this game and join, it will add more players to order. (Using wow as a reference point, alliance was more popular on PVE servers for a very long time, where horde on pvp servers was more popular). Thus far the marketing done seams to attract hardcore pvp/rvr (daoc fans) more than PVE fans. I know on my PVP server EVERYONE had heard of war and planned to play it. On my PVE server, not one guild member had heard of it until I mentioned it. Interesting to see how that plays out.
As a late closed beta player and did the preview weekend, I do have to say the PVE was at least as fun and sometimes more fun that WOW, and the pvp/rvr was hands down better than WOW. EVEN WITH some crashs, population differences and bugs. Thats pretty impressive to me.
By Zergor on Aug 28, 2008
Amen Zergor, PvE was definitely better than WOW, and RvR blew WOW apart. It would definitely benefit Mythic to try to market some towards the PvE players, as the PvP’ers are already committed.
By Will on Aug 28, 2008
I updated the the spreadsheet and made the Realms chart looks as you wanted, almost 5k votes.
I also split the ‘different roles’ to order and destruction, both side have almost the same percentage of tanks and melee dps, the different is with the destruction having more support classes but that because everybody joined the ’shaman’ train. I get the felling most of them want to play the shaman as dps class so at the end it gets even with the percentage of order ranged dps classes.
By napox on Aug 28, 2008
Awesome man, great job!
By Snafzg on Aug 28, 2008
I think the witch elf is suffering because it is female only. If you had a male option for that class I believe it would be one of the more popular class’s for destruction.
The vast majority of people have played under the same name or names for several games changing to a more female centric name also plays into the choice not to play a WE which is the case for me.
Having tried one in beta the class is a lot of fun, but as a guy I just could not see myself playing a girl in a thong with a barbed wire garter,lol.
By Dave on Aug 29, 2008
The related data to this site that jumped in front of my eyes was the two most popular careers (After over 5,000 votes) are GREENSKINS !
I believe it has something with the only 3 greenskins careers but it still a nice fact.
By napox on Aug 29, 2008
WAAAGH!
By Snafzg on Aug 29, 2008
My cynical side tells me that Order becomes more popular as we get more “kids” playing the game, as well as people less familiar with Warhammer in general. They gravitated towards Alliance in WoW, and Order is the obvious equivalent here. High elves will also get a boost once the largely male player base gets their gf’s to play. My friend is playing Chaos in beta because he knows his wife won’t find any Chaos chars “pretty” enough to play, and the high elf women fit the bill. Like I said, cynical, but unfortunately probably true.
Unlike WoW, though, WAR will probably live or die based on how balanced the sides are. The RvR side with the most people seems to pretty consistently be in the lead with regard to areas held. If you found yourself on a server with a bad discrepancy, your best bet for enjoying the end game is to switch to a more balanced server. If they have that problem too broadly it could be the slow death of the game. Will be interesting to see how they address this.
By Mike on Aug 29, 2008
I think it might be slightly different. I think that “kids” would like the Destruction side better, since I think the younger generation likes destroying/killing things in general. And Destruction sounds like their cup of tea. I think the names might have something to do with it. Alliance vs Horde doesn’t have the same connotation as Order vs Destruction.
In WoW, there was also lacking a human race to choose from on the Horde side, and the closest one was the Night Elves. But not everyone likes elves, so that may contribute to the popularity of the Chosen class and Chaos side. Humans in plate mail have a certain appeal, and I’m also sure the Empire will rise in popularity once they get their tank class.
By TC on Aug 29, 2008
This is going to be off by quite a bit for squig herder and the white lion because the pet classes were bugged during preview weekend
By Romandangler on Aug 29, 2008
I think also the different server types will see different splits. I can see a RP server having a different split to the open RvR one, for sure.
That said, all the speculation fills the time!
By arbitrary on Aug 30, 2008
Polls are not always reliable, a certain type of person surfs an MMO forum of an MMO that hasn’t even come out yet, notice how they’re so many healers and tanks, vets from other MMOs like those classes much more then someone completely new to the game.
Dersto will gain popularity from new players just looking through the character screen. Chosen and Marauders are very cool looking, hard for a new player to pass something up like that to play a normal human or the stereotypical pansy high elf.
Not saying it’s impossible for it to be balanced, just don’t get your hopes up.
But hey, if stuff goes good you haven’t lost anything.
By RedScalp on Sep 13, 2008
wow.. i had no idea shamans were the most popular. I mean i knew they were common but jeez. i only picked shaman becasue my friends said we needed a healer so i looked at the chaos healing classes, and shaman appealed to me the most. very interesting data.
By ardo123 on Oct 11, 2008