How we count

Three installs have to agree

A drop, a vendor item, a spawn point, a recipe range or a market price appears only once at least three different installs have reported it the same way. For prices and catalog entries, “different” means different upload addresses, with an IPv6 address counted by its /64 block, so one household can't make a fact true on its own. Until three agree, the page says so instead of guessing.

Unrecorded is not zero

If nobody has recorded something, the page says unrecorded. A zero appears only when it was measured: for example, “0 drops in 40 kills” once three installs killed that creature and none of them saw the item. A storage outage or a missing source is never shown as zero either.

Loot windows show what dropped, not how many kills it took, so they don't make a drop rate on their own. A rate is drops divided by recorded kills.

What we never publish

• Character names, unless that player shares them on purpose from the upload page. Guild data needs an officer's upload.
• Your install id, or the address an upload came from. Where an address matters for counting, we keep a keyed hash in private storage.
• Your list of addons, row by row. It is off unless you turn it on, and only counts that three installs share are shown.

Uploaded observations are public as anonymous records, so anyone can check our counts.

Game files and play are kept apart

Some pages, such as the talent calculator and the map, use data read from the game's own files. It is labelled as found in the game files and unconfirmed until players see it in play.

Population numbers

The census counts characters from players who turn it on in the addon with /everloot census on: their own characters, and the players they target, mouse over or group with. For other players the addon reads only race, class, level and faction. Never a name.

Each character is counted once. The game's id for a character never reaches storage: before an upload is stored, the id is replaced with a keyed code that can't be turned back into it. The census keeps the latest report of each character, from any install, so a player seen by fifty uploaders who also uploads their own characters counts once, at the latest level seen.

• Two windows: active in the last 7 days (the last seven UTC days, today included), and seen since launch. Reports from before launch, in the beta, are not counted.
• A count shows only when it covers at least 10 characters reported by at least 3 installs from at least 3 different addresses (each address is kept only as a keyed hash, so it can be counted but not read back). Below that it reads “not enough reports”, and until a whole window gets there the page says it is still collecting. Before launch it says so.
• A hidden count could otherwise be worked out by taking the shown counts away from their total. So wherever one is hidden, more are hidden with it: in every total, at least two counts are hidden and together they cover at least 10 characters. “Not enough reports” therefore means fewer than 10 characters, fewer than 3 installs or fewer than 3 addresses, or hidden to protect a small count.
• Every count that shows is rounded to the nearest 5, each from its own true number, so the shown counts don't add up exactly to their total either.
• Together these make a small count hard to work out from the published ones. They narrow what can be learned; they are not a guarantee. Someone who can send forged uploads could still probe a count by adding rows one at a time, which the limits on how much one install can send slow down but don't stop.
• Levels are grouped 1–9, 10–19 and so on up to 50–59, and at 60.
• One view for all of WoW: Forever for now. Realms are split by ruleset and region once launch shows how Forever names them.

Both sources lean. Own characters over-represent people who install addons; players seen over-represent the zones uploaders play in. The census page shows what share came from each, so you can judge.