Statistics behind World of Warcraft

Ever since Everquest began to cover up hard numbers in order to reduce strategic information being fed to rivals in the MMORPG market, MMORPG companies have been tight lipped about specific numbers about players, financies, hardware, etc. Only revealing what was necessary to shareholders.

At GDC Austin, J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce of Blizzard Entertainment. Below I have broken down the numbers they revealed. These numbers do answer some questions about how much Blizzard invests in the maintenance and further development of their biggest title, World of Warcraft.

There is or has been:
Gameplay
4,449,680,399 achievement rewards unlocked by players
1.5 million assets
70,000 spells
40,000 npcs
7650 quests
180,000 bugs since launched that have been fixed
360,000 text strings or words
Technical
120,000,000 Battle.net accounts
at least 5.5 million lines of code
75,000 cpu cores
13,250 servers
112.5 terabytes of server ram
20,000 computer systems
1.3 petabytes of storage
Staffing
2,056 game masters
340 billing manager
66 community team
245 QA team(largest)
32 programming department
37 design team
51 art department
123 cinematic department
10 production department
4,600 in total(Not all teams were broken down into numbers by the presenters)
Marketing/PR
10,000 articles written about WoW
1640 WoW events presented by Blizzard
100,000 participants at Blizzcon this year
10,000,000 views of WoW commercials
400 retail products

Source: Gamasutra GDC Austin: An inside look at the universe of Warcraft