My Most Played Characters

I've been seeing people talk about a new addon called "Account Played" that tallies up your /played time across all your characters and displays it as a neat bar chart broken down by class. I was briefly tempted to get it but ultimately decided that I didn't care that much about the class breakdown, and Altoholic already helps me keep track of my /played time across characters.

It did make me curious where exactly I stood myself though, especially after I noticed some surprises in my own roster, such as the fact that even though I've been back to playing retail for close to five and a half years now, none of the characters I've played during that time had particularly impressive /played times. I decided I'd share my top five characters in terms of accumulated hours:

Shintar - 188 days

I had a hunch that the original Shintar might still be my #1, but I was not prepared for the sheer scale of it, with her /played time still being three times that of second place. This is a character that I created in early 2007 and played until March of 2012. Let's pretend it was a round five years, or 1,827 days. That would mean that during those five years, I spent more than ten percent of my life, or about two and a half hours of every single day, playing just this character. Not WoW in general - I had alts as well, see below - but only this character. That honestly seems pretty crazy to me in hindsight, even as someone who still likes to game a lot. I know that at the start of it all, I was an unemployed student - and a student who neglected her studies at that - so I had a lot of free time, but still...

I haven't really played her since coming back to WoW, and thanks to the Shadowlands level squish she's back to being level 32. And yet still so far ahead. 

Tiirr - 64 days

I was actually surprised to find that my MoP Classic hunter is my second most played WoW character at this point. A good chunk of that can be attributed to the launch of original Classic, as the clone I made of her before the transition to Burning Crusade still shows as having 36 days of /played. But then the rest would've had to be a mix of BC Classic (which I abandoned halfway through) and whatever time I accumulated since I picked her back up last year. I mainly attribute this one to just how bingeable and impactful the original Classic launch was.

Being level 90 in MoP Classic, she's currently the highest level character I have in all of WoW's game modes (since War Within's cap is still 80). This amuses me.

Tiranea - 58 days

This was my first main, created back in October 2006. I'm not surprised that she's still high up, but I was somewhat surprised that she's this high, because from what I remember, I switched to Horde side after around six months of playing. Now, I didn't fully abandon the character at the time, and still levelled her through Wrath and Cata as well, but after those first few months I never spent much time in group content to rack up dungeon or raiding hours. Must have been those first few months when I was super addicted and basically living and breathing WoW.

I did play this one a little bit in more recent times when I levelled her up to do the night elf heritage quest back in 2023, so she's a whopping level 53.

Golu - 54 days

This was one of my major alts on Horde side back in the day, a druid on whom I both tanked and healed. I guess I'm not entirely surprised that she got a lot of play time, considering I was clearly playing a lot back then, but it does make me sweat a little to think that I was spending two and a half hours a day just playing Shintar the priest and also 54 days on this character. And yet! There's even more, such as...

Pukaja - 52 days

The tauren hunter who was my very first Horde character and also another one of my major alts during those days, though there was never much demand for me to play dps in group content when I was also willing to both tank and heal. Like Golu, she hasn't been played since Cata and was squished down to level 32.

It really stands out to me how none of my more recently played characters are even anywhere near close to those numbers. The monk that was my main during Shadowlands sits on 22 days played, my evoker on 27 days and the warrior that turned into my War Within main on a little less than 18 days. I guess WoW is more alt friendly nowadays than it was back then, so my play time is spread out across a larger number of characters, but still - I had alts back then too, and three of those are in the top five!

I guess at least some of it has to do with levelling in the vanilla world (which is why the Classic hunter is ahead of all of my retail characters created in recent years). When it takes about ten days of /played just to get to the level cap, it's just a different ballgame. I never play as intensely at the level cap unless I'm raiding (which I've kind of sworn off in WoW at this point, not counting visiting LFR once per tier), so new characters just don't have as much of a chance to rack up play time when they are capped within mere hours like my Lemix alts were.