People are toying with WoW’s new statistics page.

Lum in particular says (or not, see comments) this is the perfect Mordor’s all-seeing eye that every designer would desire. Instead I’m one of thise who looks at statistics only with a mild interest.

People usually like statistics because they can be seen as something “objective”. But the truth is that they only give the illusion of the objectiveness. Even the statistics can be seen from different perspectives and there’s always something you miss. You can never be sure of your observation and at the end this makes statistics pretty much as arbitrary as any other observation.

Take for example this problem of the Defias. It’s the most evident one if you look at the kill list, and if you browse it you can see that every flavor of Defias is in pretty high position on that list.

So, instead of trusting what that page tells me, instead I consider my own experience. Well, in my own experience the Defias, and all Westfall in general, aren’t all that dangerous. Quite the opposite. In fact the last time I leveled a character (recently), moving to Westfall felt like a liberation because I knew things would have been very smooth and better manageable.

The most (and by a HUGE margin) dangerous zone for me at that level range, alliance side, has always been Loch Modan. I’ve died hundreds of times in Loch Modan and sometime even logged out in frustration. That kind of frustration that makes you want break things. That zone is pure hell and the quests really, really hard if you go solo and don’t outlevel them. There is aggro just everywhere and there’s always a random mob waiting to ambush in the worst moment possible that it feels almost like they have developed an artificial intelligence on their own.

I’ve died to troggs at least ten times more than I died to Defias. In particular if you aren’t a melee class, it’s basically impossible to fight troggs without aggroing the whole zone. Not only the troggs themselves are a great pulling puzzle, but there isn’t any decent safe space because as you move one step you aggro a spider or a bear or a whole other trogg camp with javeling throwing scouts and casters. If something goes wrong the risk of dying is extremely high. That zone is packed with roaming mobs and all the quests send you inside caverns or through narrow places that get increasingly dangerous. The quest given by the gnome who crashed near the lake with his plane is one of the hardest in the whole game for that level range. It sends you recuperating objects that sit deep in troggs camp where you have no possibility to pull one by one and also risk that they respawn right on you if you don’t clean the zone fast enough.

Westfall, instead, is much more open wide, there are safe spots and the encounters are much more spread apart. It has more breadth and it is much more accessible in general.

So. Ubiq says that Defias need nerfing. You know what? My theory is the exact opposite. Westfall and the Defias are the “easiest” part of the WHOLE game. And it’s for that reason that the players prefer it to other zones and play there for most of the time.

The kill list, as well as the number of “soul shards” created are documenting an use. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Defias are high on the list because, yes, they are more dangerous, but more dangerous among content that has the higher usage. This reveals a *preference* more than anything else.

Loch Modan is HELL compared to Westfall, but it isn’t represented in that list. And it isn’t represented not because the zone isn’t deadly, but because the players have learnt to AVOID that zone. As it is dangerous.

Moreover, the choice of (1) the faction and (2) the race, strongly influences those stats. It’s kind of obvious that the monsters who are being fought more often (and that may kill more players) are on the alliance/human side. No surprise there.

My conclusion is that those stats aren’t saying that Westfall is the deadly zone that should be nerfed. Those stats are instead the demonstration that Westfall is the zone preferred by the majority of the players and those zones that should be looked at are the others that the players have learnt to avoid (mudflation, or path of least resistance). Which is something I had understood from my own (arbitrary) observations, and not because a page of statistics was able to reveal all that to me.

And what I wrote here is just the demonstration that the use of statistics is an arbitrary observation as any other. And as valid as any other.