Launching WoWCensus
Every realm has a story, and most of it goes unseen.
This started with a question I couldn't shake: what does a world look like when you step back from your own corner of it? I play alongside thousands of people I'll never meet. I see a name in a city, a seller at the auction house, someone passing through a zone. Each one is a small piece of something bigger. Who is still playing? What do people choose to be? Where do they go, and what do they spend their time making and trading?
Nobody puts those pieces together. So I started to.
WoWCensus has one goal: look at a realm as a whole and see what stories come out of it. It might be a server that quietly leans one way, a class going out of fashion, or an economy built around a single profession. I care more about those patterns than about the numbers themselves.
For now it's just me, collecting what I can see in game with a small addon I wrote for the job and building it up one scan at a time. One snapshot doesn't say much. Weeks of them start to.
Today is day one. There's a population view, a look at realm markets, and a lot of questions I haven't answered yet. It's an ambitious idea for a one-person project, and I'm curious where it leads.