World of Warcraft statistics

Cap'n John pointed me towards the new Blizzard game statistics page for World of Warcraft. This page updates statistical data in 6 categories for World of Warcraft every day: Most auctioned items, most created items, most dangerous NPCs, most gathered items, most looted items, and most completed quests.

Now this would be a good idea, if the page had any sort of filters. But unfortunately there are no filters at all, just a ranked list. So you can't find out which is the most often crafted sword for example, you would have to go through the list from top to bottom and see if you find any crafted swords on it. The top of most lists is hogged by trivial items: The most created item in the game is the warlock's soul shard. Doh! Copper ore is most gathered, leading to copper bars being high in both the most crafted and the most auctioned categories. Different types of cloth, like linen or runecloth top the most looted list, leading also to high spots in most created items for bandages, and most auctioned items. The top 10 most completed quests are the low level quests for level 1 to 10 characters. Which then leads to some low level mobs figuring high in the most dangerous NPCs list, sharing spots with Vael from BWL.

I would have liked to filter out trivial information, like crafted soul shards or intermediate products like copper bars or bolts of linen cloth. Looking at the most auctioned epics would have been interesting (not counting the obvious Nexus crystals). Putting a level range on the most dangerous NPCs would have been good. But by mixing it all up the statistics become a lot less useful than they could be.

Right now the only possible use I could see is using the number of created soul shards every day. This should be closely related to the number of people playing World of Warcraft, so we could use this to see whether more people play WoW during the holidays, or after the expansion comes out.