WoWjutsu

Did I mention that I love my readers? They are a source of a lot of interesting input. Today one anonymous commenter mentioned WoWjutsu, a site I had never heard of before. So I went and had a look, and found it very, very interesting.

The original purpose of the site seems to be to rank guilds world-wide, regardless of server. That didn't interest me much. But to do so they map the progress of all the guilds on all servers through the various raid dungeons, and that yields some very, very cool information, due to the way this is done. WoWjutsu's method is only using data from the Armory, not data collected or provided by the guilds itself. That makes the system relatively reliable and stable. What they do is simply check what characters wear what kind of epics. And as each epic can be backtracked to one boss mob killed, WoWjutsu can see what guild killed what raid boss how often, and calculate a score out of that. As I said, I wasn't interested in the score, and there are some obvious error margins involved in the calculation, like disenchanted epics etc.. Scores are contentious, because some people won't like to hear that Horde guilds outperform Alliance guilds, and Euro guilds outperform US guilds.

But the table WoWjutsu shows on the left column has such significant steps that the margin of error of the method is small compared to the result. The table lists the raid progress of all the major raiding guilds together. To be included in the count a guild has to apply on the WoWjutsu website, have at least 10 level 70s, and have a score which amounts to having been half through Karazhan at least. Thus "casual" guilds and players aren't counted. Now lets have a look at the currently displayed data:

Due to this being basically a requirement for being counted at all, 99.98% of the counted guilds have killed bosses in Karazhan. 64% killed at least one boss in Gruul's lair, 24% killed Magtheridon, 20% killed a boss in Serpentshrine Cavern, 22% in The Eye. Only 2.12% of guilds counted killed one of the bosses of Mount Hyjal, and only 1.83% in the Black Temple. Unfortunately there is no number representing how many percent of level 70 characters wear at least one raid epic, so we don't know anything about the ratio of raiders to non-raiders. But we *do* know that of all the guilds that made significant progress in Karazhan, and can thus be considered as "raiders", only 2% make it to the top. These numbers will increase a bit with time, but in any case it makes those places rather exclusive. No wonder WoW has something strongly resembling class warfare, if the underclass and the upper crust can be so easily identified by their gear.