70,000 Death Knights slaughtered in Great Server Downtime of 2009
It's been some time since I last looked at the Top Lists on the official World of Warcraft site. I only thought to glance at it since I stumbled upon my own post about it from December of last year, when Loken reigned supreme as the most dangerous mob in the game. These days, Yogg-Saron's other minions have taken his crown from him. Interestingly, the most dangerous mob bounces back and forth between the first boss of Ulduar and one of the last bosses of Ulduar. Flame Leviathan is apparently far more deadly than I'd ever have expected, and either there are more players than I thought fighting General Vezax and Yogg-Saron, or the few guilds on those two bosses really like wiping. I guarantee that my raid added a thousand deaths to the Guardian of Yogg-Saron tally a few of those nights.
The correlation between Flame Leviathan being tops or Vezax being tops seems to be a matter of the day of the week. Monday night leading into Tuesday morning, Vezax and Yogg-Saron reign supreme. Wednesday and Thursday when everyone has a fresh Ulduar ID? Flame Leviathan is ahead significantly. Makes sense. 'Risen Ghoul' is consistently near the top, too. Nerf Death Knights plz k thx.
The most interesting stat of all of these this time around is certainly not most dangerous mob, though. No sir. The Most Completed Quests section is hilarious. You can see the effects of this past Tuesday's lengthy downtime for certain battlegroups. How can you tell? Well, the date of the data is when it was uploaded to the site. It's the data from the day prior, however. The data listed for Wednesday (which is what happened Tuesday)? There are no daily quests in the Most Completed like there usually is, no sir. It's the entire Death Knight starter quest chain. Yes, that's right, you can actually see how many people on North American realms rerolled throw-away Death Knights on different realms because their server was down. The very first quest, In Service of the Lich King, was completed 64,152 times.
64,152 people rolled throwaway alts on another server because theirs was down. Surely some were multiples, but just consider that number. Nearly 70,000 new Death Knights were made because people couldn't play their mains. That is not a small number. Most of those characters will never be played again.
When it comes to auctions sold, things haven't changed much in the last few months. Infinite Dust, Saronite, and Runecloth all dance around in 1st, 2nd and 3rd places daily. Runecloth is actually surprising since you don't need it for reputation anymore now that the Tournament is around, but maybe dropping thousands of gold is worth not needing to run endless dailies.
Copper Bars and Soul Shards are still the most created items. I sort of expected Heavy Frostweave Bandages to rate higher than floating around 7th place, who doesn't carry around a stack of bandages these days? Then I asked myself when the last time I used one of my bandages was... and I can't remember. After I have my stack of 20 on a character, I make them just to vendor them when Frostweave prices are down on the auction house. Their lower-than-expected rank makes some sense after I think about it.
Quests Completed is definitely the most fascinating state out of them all. 70,000 abandoned Death Knights due to the downtime of one day. Wow.
