Is there a way to determine how many hours you have been playing World of Warcraft?

Question

I am curious, is there a way you can find out how many hours of play time you have clocked in WOW, Either in total, or by character / realm?

Answer 1

For your individual character playtime just type /played whenever you are logged in. There are also a couple of addons available that do this every time you log in with a character and give you a nice overview (I believe "Altoholic" was one of them - can't check right now).

Answer 2

Yup! /played will tell you (on each character) how many hours you have logged!

Answer 3

Some addons (Carbonite for one) will add up all the times on all the characters you've played on, so you get one big number.

What it won't do is multiply that by your hourly wage to see how much money you lost playing it. For me, I'm in the hundreds of thousands lost...

Answer 4

As part of the protection of data privacy policy one can request a copy of his/her own data as 7Zip archive via the respective support option. The generation may take up to 30 days but the final result should include also the total time played on the account.

The result from the above-mentioned policy is a HTML page that contains information like when you conntected to the Battle.net, whispered to friends, divided by battle.net-whispers and in-game whispers, when and what you baught, what you received as gift and so on and so on.

Unfortunately, there is no direct key available that identifies the total time played either on account level nor per char. The HTML page however contains a Gameplay History section which contains a table that lists the following parts:

| Title             | Start Date           | Stop Date           | IP Address | Recorded Date       |
| ----------------- + -------------------- + ------------------- + ---------- + ------------------- |
| ...               | ...                  | ...                 | ...        |                     |
| World of Warcraft | 03/27/2020 15:10:38  | 03/27/2020 15:16:04 | Your IP    | 03/27/2020 15:16:05 | 
| ...               | ...                  | ...                 | ...        |                     |

Sadly, this list only contains the playtimes of the last year.

In the Account Activity section of the HTML file received you find more fine -grained information on your log-in behavior such as:

| Time (UTC)          | Region | Activity Type           | IP Address | Geo-IP Location     |
| ------------------- + ------ + ----------------------- + ---------- + ------------------- |
| ...                 | ...    | ...                     | ...        | ...                 |
| 2019-12-01 13:05:39 | EU     | Logged into WoW         | Your IP    | Vienna, 09, Austria |
| 2019-12-01 13:05:56 | EU     | Logged onto Character   | Your IP    | Vienna, 09, Austria |
| 2019-12-01 16:52:26 | EU     | Logged out of Character | Your IP    | Vienna, 09, Austria |
| ...                 | ...    | ...                     | ...        | ...                 |
| 2019-12-02 01:59:33 | EU     | Logged out of WoW       | Your IP    | Vienna, 09, Austria |
| ...                 | ...    | ...                     | ...        | ...                 |

but again, this list is incomplete and you can't calculate the time i.e. per toon. Not sure if the number of entries returned here is limited by time (roughly the last 15 month) or number-based (roughly the last 3k logins)

As such, even though the support entry in their forum suggest to use /played on each toon to learn how much time was spent in WoW directly, through the hint on the protection of data privacy policy I'd assumed that this HTML file would also contain the total time played value.

So, for calculating the total time played on all the toons within the last year, the HTML file can be used. If more fine-graind information, i.e. per toon or the total time since release was played needs to be known, this method is insufficient.

Interestingly though, they list a main character as well as the gold it has stored. For someone that hasn't played retail since mid 2015 this was rather surprising to see, even though I still don't know how much time I have logged onto my chars in WoW yet and I don't feel the urgency to install retail to find it out ^^