Activity on Chinese WoW servers has always been pretty mysterious. For the longest time, press releases would mention—and repeatedly confirm—that about 50% of all players were active in the Asian region. Mythic+ data from Korean and Taiwanese servers has been available for a long time. With 5% and 2% of the total metrics, the bulk of that 50% was left to just the Chinese players.
Until now, Chinese data on Raider.IO came from manual uploads by a few thousands registered users.
The Total Numbers Before
For the current season, this meant just 324,000 runs compared to over 22 million globally. The leaderboard still showed comparatively high number of characters. 353,000 compared to a global trend of just over 2.9 million. This number is quite high since every manually uploaded run would show a lot of unregistered characters. Sometimes only once across the entire list of runs. So we could only speculate how many runs were done outside of the uploaded ones. Until July 15, the Chinese leaderboards were adding a few hundred entries per hour during peak activity.
The Biggest Data Update in Raider.IO History
The cut-off point for the data shown in the two graphs was just hours before the API becoming accessible. Usually Raider.IO is seeing spikes of 30,000 to 40,000 new entries earlier within a season. From what we know, you can’t request more than 36,000 entries per hour. But maybe these restrictions work differently for NetEase. In the first 6 hours, only up to 75,000 new entries were added to the leaderboards. That value then shot up to 300,000 for a while and stabilized around between 200,000 and 250,000 for about 24 hours. After this the entire page experienced major update problems.
For most of this update period, the other four regions saw almost no new data. After recent entries were added to those lists, the overall update rate stabilized. Since 10 a.m. CEST on July 18, the lists have been gaining around 10,000 new entries per hour. The updates for the Chinese data still do not show a pattern of the usual 24 hour cycle of ebb and flow. Meaning we still have no solid guess at what the final numbers for S2 will look like.
The Total Numbers for Now
Looking at historical data from when Chinese players were active on Taiwanese realms, we can make a few estimates. None of the current data from Chinese servers is fully up to date. The early weeks of TWW S2 are missing a lot of data and are getting most of the updates. By the end of the season, the Chinese leaderboards should show between 1.7 and 1.9 million characters and between 12-15 million completed runs!
