WoW Forever Data started as a census of the WoW Forever beta and grew into a set of tools for the live game. Today the front door is an armory that draws any level 10+ character straight from Blizzard's API: gear and stats, talents, professions, pets, mounts, toys, honor and reputations, with the character turning in 3D. Behind it, every lookup quietly builds a census of guilds that no one has to stand in a capital city to collect.
How it works
- You look up a character. Type a first name and surname on the home page and the armory asks Blizzard for that character and shows it live.
- The site remembers the find. A character that exists is kept with its in-game basics: name, level, race, class, faction, ruleset, region and guild. Nothing about you is kept beyond the fact that a lookup happened.
- A new guild gets a roster call. The first time a found character names a guild the site has not seen, it fetches that guild and its full roster: every member with level, class, race, faction and rank, including characters below level 10 that the armory cannot show yet.
- Guild pages read the census, not Blizzard. Level spread, class mix, faction and size over time come from the stored rosters, refreshed on a schedule, so a guild page is instant and every chart says when its numbers were taken.
- The counter on the home page is the loop turning. It is the running total of successful lookups, and the activity board under the search box is who was found last. Both move because other players are using the site.
Using Blizzard's official API
Blizzard's API has no search and no list of characters or guilds. You can only ask about a name you already know. That is why your lookups matter: each one is a name confirmed against the real game, and each guild it reveals is a few hundred more. The beta census listed 8,523 guild names; 256 of the ones checked so far carried over to the live game and seed the guild census, and every lookup adds to it.
What a lookup stores, all of it in-game facts the API publishes:
- Character: name, level, race, class, faction, ruleset, region, guild and portrait.
- Guild: name, faction, ruleset, member count and creation date, and the roster with each member's level, class, race, faction and rank.
- The lookup itself: the name typed and whether it was found, so the not-found page can get better at catching typos.
Blizzard's current API limits and known issues
- A character appears only once it has reached level 10 and logged out at least once. Below that it exists in its guild's roster, not in the armory.
- Guild rosters are served from a three-hour cache on Blizzard's side, so three hours is as fresh as any guild page can be.
- A roster stops at 1,000 members, so the very largest guilds read as 1,000.
- There is no population figure of any kind in the API, no PvP leaderboard yet, and no Hardcore ruleset. Population here is “characters seen through the API”, counted per ruleset and faction, and labelled as such.
- The site stays far inside Blizzard's request limits: a lookup is a handful of calls, a guild crawl is two.
Improving the WoW Forever Data project
Most WoW Forever trackers run an addon that samples /who around one player on one faction and one ruleset at a time. That will always see more of the faction doing the sampling, more of the zones that player visits, and nothing while they are offline. A census built from Blizzard's rosters has no such blind spot: it sees both factions, every ruleset and every level, and it keeps working while everyone is playing.
Numbers pooled from many submissions also need careful deduplication before they mean anything, and you should be able to see what happens under the hood before a figure is put in front of you. Everything this site shows carries its source and its date.
Building the WoW Forever Data visualizations
The beta census was the first pass: population by race, class, faction and level, the levelling curve and class share by day, read from every public census of the beta and kept as a finished dataset, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. The next pass is the guild census: a page for every guild with its level spread, class and race mix, faction and growth, a leaderboard by size, and site-wide population and faction balance by ruleset built from the rosters. Each chart will say when its numbers were taken.
Let's collaborate
If you run a guild, build tools, or just want to compare notes on the data, send a friend request on Discord to @tcgpt.
WoW Forever Data is a fan site and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment. World of Warcraft, Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries; item, class and race icons, portraits and character models are Blizzard's game art, shown to identify what they stand for.