Top Ten Causes of Death in Hardcore

I quite liked it when Blizzard released statistics about deaths on hardcore shortly after launch, so two months later I was kind of wondering when/if they were going to post some sort of update... so I was most pleased when one appeared in my video recommendations yesterday:

It's less than five minutes long and well worth a watch, but to provide a written summary anyway:

At this point, nearly 3 million characters have died on the hardcore servers, and the top ten causes of death at the time of the video were as follows:

1. Falling
2. Kobold Miner
3. Voidwalker Minion
4. Defias Trapper
5. Wendigo
6. Defias Pillager
7. Other players
8. Drowning
9. Porcine Entourage
10. Kobold Tunneler 

The thing that immediately stands out is that seven of these are low-level mobs, while the other three causes of death are level-neutral and can theoretically affect a character at any level. So a lot of people died early on - which is unsurprising - though I think percentage-wise this will go down over time as fewer inexperienced people try out hardcore for a laugh.

The next thing you'll probably notice is that six of the seven mobs are from Alliance starting areas, and only one from Horde. Judging by the comments, people read this in a variety of ways, from "nobody plays Horde on hardcore" to "Alliance players are bad" to "Horde starting zones are just easier". My favourite take was that Hordies are too busy falling to their deaths in Undercity and Thunder Bluff to have time to engage with mobs. There's probably at least a grain of truth in all of these.

Still, I also find myself agreeing with the comments that state that it would be interesting to see more videos like this, but filtered by faction or level for example. Since they do provide the actual death count for each source in the video, we know that the top ten are "only" responsible for about 14% of all deaths, which leaves a lot of room for other ways to die.

To talk about the items on the list in specific, well... I'm still surprised by how high falling and drowning rank, despite of being level-agnostic. It's not that I don't "get" how you can die to these things and I've certainly had my fair share of deaths from these way back when I was noob (e.g. by accidentally walking off one of the bridges in Thunder Bluff), but once you get the general idea of which heights are dangerous and how quickly you run out of air underwater, it's not that hard to take a bit of care in my opinion. It's not like you'll ever find yourself at the edge of a cliff or underwater unexpectedly.

Most of the mobs are not a surprise, as many of them are located in caves and can gang up on you due to fast respawns. I guess it's a little surprising that murlocs aren't on there, and that Defias Trappers rank above Defias Pillagers. I guess the trappers can net you when you try to run away (which isn't even mentioned in the video, which is quite an oversight in my opinion)... plus pillagers and murlocs are well known for being deadly at this point, so maybe their numbers are somewhat suppressed by people actually taking greater care around them now than they did twenty years ago.

The one that surprised/impressed me the most is the Porcine Entourage, because there are only two of these out in the world and they are neutral, so dying to these is never a pure accident but always overconfidence. Though I do get that people may not realise that they come as a package deal with Princess or just how hard they hit.

Nothing's as interesting about hardcore as hearing about how people die.