How it works

Every number on Game Pulse has a source, and every board says when it was read. The header’s Games menu opens any of the eight sections; Population puts every game’s player counts side by side, and News gathers every section’s news in one list. This page goes through the eight games one by one: each source, what it feeds and how often it is read, what operators keep by hand and what needs credentials. The tables at the foot show how each source answered most recently.

WoW: Forever: operator-maintained

There is no official WoW: Forever ranking, and Blizzard’s game data API has no WoW: Forever namespace that Game Pulse could build on (community reports of a profile-forever namespace answer 404), so the site does not call it. The board was seeded from public race coverage: worldfirst60.com, race.aotc.gg and armorywowforever.com, read on 7 November 2026 at 09:10 UTC, each racer with the site that reported it and the time read. Operators keep it from the WordPress admin (name, class, race, faction, region, realm, ruleset, guild, Twitch channel, level, XP percent, current zone, source and status), and anyone can register or update a racer with the public form, which has the same protections as the contact form (a hidden field for bots, a minimum time to fill it in and a limit per connection). Submissions wait for an operator to approve them. Each change of level or percent is kept in a bounded history (the last 200 updates per racer).

The race to 60 is over, so the race page is the final standings: each racer’s level as last read, with its source and the time it was read, and no pace or estimate. The world first 60 is given as each tracker records it: worldfirst60.com first saw Cloud Bells at 60 at 03:10 UTC on 7 November 2026, armorywowforever.com gives Jokerd Prime at 03:15 UTC. The class firsts name the first of each class to 60 with the time its tracker gives (armorywowforever.com and race.aotc.gg, read 8 November 2026), or “still unclaimed”; the site says “reached” only where a source gives that time. Counts on the stats page are among the racers this site tracks, never everyone playing. XP is estimated from level and percent with the classic 1 to 60 experience table, because WoW: Forever has not published its own; those numbers carry a ≈.

• News: Wowhead’s news feed, the WoW: Forever and Classic headlines, read every 30 minutes by the site’s 15-minute sampler.
• Raids and roadmap: Blizzard’s own announcements, cited where they are used (the first raid tier, Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit and Onyxia’s Lair, opens on 9 December 2026).
• Realm status is not read at all: the WoW: Forever pages link to Blizzard’s own status pages.
• Deaths: the stats page holds the Classic Hardcore statistics below and the report form for WoW: Forever one-life deaths; the racers’ map was retired with the race.

Classic Hardcore deaths: the Deathlog database

The WoW stats page’s Classic Hardcore death tables come from the Deathlog community database: more than a million death records from the WoW Classic Era Hardcore realms, collected by the players who run the Deathlog addon and published under GPL-3.0 with the author’s note “Feel free to use the database for any purpose!”. Game Pulse read the precomputed per-zone, per-creature and per-class statistics in the DeathlogData package (version 0.5.26, 1,685,923 records) and counted deaths by level from the full database (1,778,320 records) on 7 November 2026, and ships the totals with the plugin: the site makes no request to Deathlog. Character names are not used. This is Classic Hardcore, not WoW: Forever, and every place that shows it says so.

OSRS Hardcore Worlds: automatic

The population comes from the official world list, every 15 minutes: everyone online and each Hardcore world’s players, location and activity. The race board is built from a roster of players, looked up one by one on the official Hardcore Worlds hiscores through the per-player JSON lookup (index_lite.json). The roster is the racers operators add, plus the top 25 of the overall hiscores table whenever that table answers. The board’s # is the place among the players this site tracks; the official hiscores rank under each name counts every Hardcore Worlds player.

• The overall hiscores table (an HTML page) answers some servers, including this site’s host, with HTTP 403 and a Cloudflare check. Game Pulse never tries to get around a bot check: it does not pretend to be a browser and keeps no cookies. It asks for the table at most once per ten-minute cache window, backs off for half an hour after a refusal, and uses the table only as optional enrichment.
• The per-player lookups, the world list and the news feed answer this server normally, so the race board and the population keep working when the table is refused.
• Every card degrades per source: each section shows what it has, and a card whose source is unavailable says which source and since when, instead of one general error.
• The sampler’s work is bounded: a roster size limit (50 by default, at most 100), one lookup per player per 15 minutes, a time budget per run, and a stop on the first 403 or 429 with a back-off before the next attempt.

Deaths are automatic too. The per-player lookup carries a death record for a dead Hardcore character, the date in milliseconds and the world, which Jagex added to the Hardcore Worlds hiscores; Game Pulse files each one once, with the total level from the same lookup. A tracked character whose XP falls to a fresh start died and was reset, and is filed with the time of the lookup that saw it. A name that is not on the hiscores is never shown as dead: the board says exactly that it is not on the hiscores. The count is the deaths among the players this site tracks, with the age of the newest record, never every Hardcore death; the hiscores record no place and no cause, so the deaths are a list, not a map.

• News: the official Old School news feed, read every 30 minutes by the sampler.
• The map is the OSRS Wiki’s rendered game map, loaded by your browser from the wiki; this site places the Hardcore worlds’ server locations and the shooting star landing sites on it and requests none of the tiles itself.
• Shooting stars: the Star Miners community star list, filled by players scouting with the Star Miners RuneLite plugin, read every 5 minutes and at most once a minute while the stars page is open.
• Steam’s count for Old School RuneScape is stored for the population view only and is not drawn on the Old School stats page: Steam players are a share of all players; the official world list counts everyone.

RuneScape 3: automatic

• The roster: the official RuneScape hiscores player lookups (index_lite.json), every 15 minutes, one lookup per player: total level, XP, the 29 skills, RuneScore and Hardcore deaths. The Activity page lists who gained XP in the last 24 hours from those readings, and the home page names the players already at total level 3232 first.
• Activity: RuneMetrics public profiles, four profiles per 15 minutes, each at most every two hours: quests, combat level and the activity feed (level-ups, 99s, 120s, XP milestones, drops and boss kills).
• Players: Jagex’s player count (everyone in RuneScape and Old School together), every 15 minutes, and Steam’s count for RuneScape 3 (app 1343400), every 15 minutes. The RuneScape 3 estimate is derived, not published: Jagex’s combined count minus Old School’s official all-worlds total from the same 15 minutes, never below zero.
• News: the RuneScape news feed, every hour. When its newest Double XP item says the event has started, the overview and News show a banner with the end date the item gives, or its start date and a link when it gives none. Market movers: the Grand Exchange price rises and falls lists, every six hours.

Path of Exile: automatic

The official league list says whether the new league exists and gives its SSF and Hardcore variants; it is read every hour. The official ladder API gives the top 200 of each ladder every 15 minutes: rank, character, class, level, experience, whether the character is dead, the account and its linked Twitch channel. Requests carry the identifying User-Agent the Path of Exile developer documentation asks for, with the site owner’s contact address, honour the X-Rate-Limit headers and wait out a 429 for as long as its Retry-After says. Until the new league appears in the league list, the race and characters pages show the countdown to its start, the news and the last league at a glance (class shares, alive and dead, from the stored ladder samples) instead of the last league’s rows, and the overview labels its leader as the last league’s leader; both switch to the live boards by themselves once the league is listed.

• Characters: the character window for public profiles in the top 30 of each ladder: gear, gems and the main skill at most once an hour per character, the passive tree at most every six hours.
• Players: Steam’s public count for Path of Exile (app 238960), every 15 minutes; the game also runs on its own launcher and on consoles, so it is a share of all players.

Path of Exile 2: automatic

• The official Path of Exile 2 ladder (pathofexile2.com), every 15 minutes on all four ladders. It lists the top 1,000 of each ladder: that is the ladder’s own limit, not how many characters play. Ascendancy names are pathofexile2.com’s own (the ladder writes “Mercenary3” for the Gemling Legionnaire); a character that has not ascended shows its base class.
• The trade league list, every hour, so the board follows the current challenge league.
• The character window (realm poe2), checked once a day until Grinding Gear Games serves Path of Exile 2 characters there.
• News: the official Path of Exile 2 announcements forum, every hour. Players: Steam’s public count (app 2694490), every 15 minutes.

Hearthstone: automatic

• Blizzard’s public Hearthstone leaderboards in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific: Legend ranks in Standard, Wild and Twist, Battlegrounds ratings and the number of players on each board. Each board’s first page is read at most once an hour, the Battlegrounds pages to the top 100 every six hours.
• News: the official Hearthstone news, every two hours.
• The current expansion’s Legendary cards and the newest card backs come from Blizzard’s Game Data API, which needs a client ID and secret in the settings; without them those panels are not drawn.

Puzzle Pirates: automatic

Grey Havens’ Third Party Software policy lets software read the oceans’ public pages at the pace of normal manual use, so Game Pulse reads one kind of page per 15-minute run, one request per ocean server.

• Blockade boards, every 30 minutes.
• The colonized islands pages and the flag and crew fame lists, every two hours: the Oceans tables give each island’s ruling flag its official fame level.
• News: YPPedia’s official release notes and The Spyglass, every six hours, for the central News page. YPPedia’s firewall refuses this server at the moment, so the section has no news tab while it does.
• A pirate’s page only when someone looks the pirate up, at most once an hour per name; the portrait and badge images are loaded by your browser from the ocean.

Brighter Shores: automatic

• Players: Steam’s public player count for Brighter Shores (app 2791440), every 15 minutes. Steam is the game’s only download, so the line counts nearly everyone playing. The section is one page with a News tab: players, the firsts, the professions and the episodes.
• News: Fen Research’s announcements as Steam’s news feed carries them, every three hours.
• Leaderboard firsts: the Brighter Shores Wiki’s Leaderboards article, read through the wiki’s API once a day.

Players over time: automatic

Every 15 minutes the sampler asks Steam’s public player count (no key) once for each of five apps: Old School RuneScape (1343370), RuneScape 3 (1343400), Path of Exile (238960), Path of Exile 2 (2694490) and Brighter Shores (2791440). Steam players are a share of all players; the official world list counts everyone, so the Old School stats page charts the official totals only and keeps Steam’s Old School count for the population view. A refusal or rate limit from Steam is backed off like every other source.

The same sample stores each Hardcore world’s players from the official world list. Histories are compact: 15-minute points for seven days (Steam) or 48 hours (each world), then hourly means for 90 or 30 days, compacted as they are written, so the stored size stays bounded. Peaks and changes are computed from those stored samples, never estimated.

Twitch: needs credentials

Live status and viewer counts need a Twitch application’s client ID and secret in Settings, Game Pulse (an app access token; only public stream data is read). Without them, boards draw no live or viewer columns and still link each channel. The “Watch the top 5” section of each race page needs no credentials: it uses Twitch’s own embedded player.

Maps and deaths

The Old School map is the OSRS Wiki’s game map, on the shooting star page, with every star and the places of Gielinor. WoW: Forever has no map page any more: the racers’ zones went with the race. Nothing publishes where WoW: Forever characters die; the closest public record is the Deathlog community database for WoW Classic Hardcore, on the WoW stats page beside the WoW: Forever report form.

• Death reports come from the public form on the WoW: Forever stats page (a hidden field, a signed time check and three per connection per 15 minutes) and wait as private entries until an operator approves or removes them; they are reported by players and approved by the site; locations are as reported.
• Old School has no death map: the hiscores record no place of death. Hardcore Worlds deaths from the hiscores (the death record, or an XP drop to a fresh start) and a tracked player who fell off the hiscores are automatic entries in the list on the Deaths page.
• The Hardcore ruleset for WoW: Forever is announced for winter 2026-27, so WoW deaths before then are from players’ own one-life runs as reported.

The first three hours

The import runs the sampler once and then every 5 minutes for three hours, before it settles to every 15 minutes, so the boards, charts and maps have readings at once. Every chart draws from its first reading, with the time it starts from; a column or a tile appears once it has a value, and the live and viewer columns only with Twitch credentials. A section added later starts its history when it first goes live.

Class firsts and class leaders

The WoW: Forever class firsts are the first character of each class to reach 60, with the time its tracker gives, or “still unclaimed” while no tracker lists one. The Path of Exile class leaders are the best-placed character of each class on a ladder sample, with the classes the ladder itself reports.

The maths

• XP/h is the experience gained between the first sample of the last three hours and the latest sample, divided by the time between them, from two samples at least ten minutes apart. With a single reading it is the average since the race began (marked avg): every character started from nothing at the launch.
• The estimate to the goal is the experience still needed divided by that pace. It assumes the racer keeps the same pace without breaks, so it is a pace, not a promise; past a year it reads “more than a year at this pace” rather than a precise figure.
• For a total-level goal below the maximum, the experience still needed is the cheapest set of level-ups that reaches it: always the skill whose next level costs least.
• Last 6 h is the experience gained since the first sample of the last six hours.

Every source, right now