About

FAQ's

What is grim Hammer, and why do you exist?

I think all of us who have a character in World of Warcraft watch certain information about our characters over time. When we are leveling, we watch our level, and how far we have to go to reach the next level. When we reach maximum level we watch how good our gear is. We try to score achievements. We all have our own goals. Blizzard has given us great ways to track the information about our character. But finding out how well you are doing relative to other characters isn't easy. You can look up other character information, but at best you’ll only be getting a very limited sample. What does the average level 85 character have for the stat you're interested in? How about all the characters of your class and spec? How many are there of your class and spec? How many level 85's are there on the realm? Who ranks first in achievements, health, armor, battleground rankings or honorable kills? Where do you rank? Are you good, or do you just think you might be? We are trying an experiment in providing the answer to those questions and more.

Where do you get your information from?

We get our information on player stats directly from the battle.net databases. We attempt to update them weekly. We attempt to identify level 85 players in a few ways, they aren't always easy to find and the numbers change.

Why shouldn't we just use the Battle.net information then?

You should. The information is good, it's current and the presentation is excellent. But Blizzard does not provide ranking, statistical or population information. We're trying to provide some of that information.

Why do you provide information only about level 85's?

Under level 85 the focus of the game is on leveling. That is the key stat, others really don't matter too much. Rankings are pretty much meaningless. If you rank in 15,875th place for a given stat at level 68, how does that compare to a level 42 who's in 22,327th place? Plus being at level 85 means the character has "arrived", he's made it. The game then becomes playing the numbers game, improve stats. You can look at it differently, but that is really what it comes down to.

Why do you provide only Eldre' Thalas information?

It's kind of chosen as an experiment, or beta test. We are numbers people, we want to have some fun with this. Plus, we play on Eldre' Thalas and we are interested in seeing how we rank.

 

What are the Guild Rankings and what do they mean?

Since we have the information of the stats of all active level 85 characters on the Eldre Thalas realm in our database, and we know what guild they belong to, we are able to get certain statistical information for all of the level 85 members of a given guild. Some of the information is pretty straight forward, like the names of all the guilds in the realm and how many active level 85 players are in the guild. Some of the statistical information doesn’t have much meaning because its very class based. And guilds vary widely in numbers which would distort totals information.

Looking at the information that we have, we’ve identified three statistics that would be influenced by character actions and not the class of the character. They are: Achievements, Average Item Level and Honorable Kills. We will rank and report the Total Achievements for active level 85 characters in a guild, the average achievements for the guild members, the average Item Level for all members, the total Honorable Kills for the guild members, and the average honorable kills for the guild members. Remember that all the numbers are for active level 85 characters in a given guild.

What does it all mean? You tell us. For us, it’s all in fun and another way to waste our time looking at numbers.

 

I can't find a character.

Well, we don't have all level 85's. We keep looking and adding, but some are harder to find then others. You can speed the process by adding a character on our character add page. Remember, it has to be a level 85 character on the Eldre' Thalas realm. If it is, we'll grab the stats from battle.net and the information and rankings should be available right away.

Something is wrong. Or it doesn't work. Or the numbers don't tell the true story.

Yeah. Gathering and maintaining the information has been a sizable undertaking for us, so we would be more surprised than anyone if everything worked. But given that the numbers are accurate (and we'll make every attempt to see that they are within the scope of our project) remember that they tell the story that they tell. It is their story. Your story might be different, but that's yours to tell.