How the boards work · Wanted: Dead or... Dead

How kills are checked

Anyone can edit an addon on their own computer, so we don't take any one record's word for it. The more other players saw a kill, the more it counts.

Where records come from. The addon notes every death it sees, and when you die it notes who killed you from your death recap. The desktop app also reads the game's combat log, which says who landed the killing blow on every death near you. Before uploading, the app signs everything with a key that never leaves your PC, so nobody can tamper with your records or upload fake ones in your name.

Every kill ends up as one of these:

Confirmed: another person, signed in to this site with Battle.net on a different computer, recorded the same death. Confirmed kills always rank first.
Witnessed: someone else's own record names the killer: the victim's addon, from their death recap, or a groupmate's, uploaded by that person's app as their own. One person's records witness at most 20 of a player's kills an hour; past that they only count as claimed. A record nobody made as their own witnesses nothing, however many copies of it are uploaded.
Claimed: only the killer's own records say so.

Your alts and your second computer can't confirm your kills.

We call witnessed and claimed kills "unconfirmed". They still show up in every count, next to the confirmed number, so the boards aren't empty on day one. But to pass someone on a board, you need more confirmed kills than they have.

Who stands behind a death. Only the people whose own apps recorded a death stand behind it. A death that reached us only as copies passed along by other addons, with nobody's app recording it as their own, counts nowhere, not as a kill, a death or a battle's, unless a kill in it is confirmed. One person's deaths count up to 60 per zone per hour, and so do deaths recorded by the same two people and nobody else: a second account costs nothing, so two together are believed no further than one.

The victim's own record. If you die with Wanted running, your addon records who killed you, and nobody else can make that record for you. It confirms the kill like anyone else's record would, nothing more. And a victim can't make a kill disappear: if they turn Wanted off, only their record is missing, and everyone else's still count. Every death has its own page showing every record of it from both factions, including what the victim's says.

Screenshot proof. When you kill someone with a bounty on them, the addon puts who, where, when and the kill's id on screen and takes a screenshot for you. The person who posted the bounty can see you've got one, and if there's an argument, the picture settles it. Someone could fake the text, but faking the whole scene around it is a lot harder.

Bounties are checked the same way, and gold never moves on its own: the poster looks at the claim and decides whether to pay. Before they do, the addon warns them if nobody else saw the death, or if the only witnesses are brand new or only ever vouch for that one bounty hunter, and it links to the death's page here. If the poster disputes a claim, that stays on the bounty hunter's record.

Who stands behind a bounty. A bounty, a raise or withdrawal, a hunt, a claim, a confirmation and a payment are the word of the character named on them. Once that character's addon signs its records (addon 1.19 with the app), only the ones their key signed count for them, and this site passes nothing else under their name on to other players; what they recorded before their key, and what their own app uploads as their own, still count. A player without the app is taken at their word, as before.

Too good to be true. If someone racks up more unconfirmed kills than anyone could, their numbers go under review and only their confirmed kills rank.

Which kills count

A kill means a killing blow: whoever landed the last hit gets it. Everyone else who helped gets an assist. The boards rank killing blows. Assists have their own board and column and never count as kills.

Naming the killer. The game only tells your addon who killed you, so that's where the name comes from when you die. It also names anyone in your group who lands a killing blow. Either way, that's a witnessed kill for them, even if they don't use Wanted themselves, up to 20 an hour from any one person's records.

Assists come from two places:

When the game gives you an honorable kill you didn't land, the addon records an assist on the death it just saw (WoW Forever doesn't say who the victim was). These are confirmed the same way as kills and count toward Honorable kills and Helped kill.
The desktop app gives an assist to every player on the killer's side, other than the killer, that its combat log saw damaging the victim in the 15 seconds before they died. Your own log naming you is only your word; another player's log confirms it. These count toward Helped kill, not Honorable kills.

The boards

Most killing blows: Killing blows another player confirmed first, then the unconfirmed ones. Helping with a kill is an assist, on its own board.
Notoriety: Points for killing blows other players backed up (3 confirmed, 2 witnessed), assists (1), bounties collected (10) and healing seen in two or more players' combat logs (1 per 10,000). Kills only the killer recorded earn nothing.
Unconfirmed kills: Kills nobody else's app has confirmed yet: witnessed or only claimed. These never rank anywhere else.
Most efficient: Share of fights won, with at least 10 confirmed kills and deaths.
Longest streak: Most kills in a row without dying.
Multi-kills: Best multi-kill: killing blows each within 30 seconds of the one before. Ties go to whoever made more multi-kills.
Best day: Most kills in one day.
Most feared: Different players killed.
Lone wolves: Kills made alone.
Duel rating: A rating from solo kills and deaths, with at least 5 duels.
Honorable kills: Honorable kills the game credited: their own and the ones they helped with.
Helped kill: Honorable kills they helped with but didn't land. These never count as kills.
Top healers: Healing on other friendly players under enemy attack (never on yourself), without overhealing, from the Wanted app's combat logs. Each minute counts once, however many logs saw it.
Most damage: Damage to enemy players, from the Wanted app's combat logs. Each minute counts once, however many logs saw it.
Challengers: Challenges finished this season. Ties go to whoever has more challenge kills, which count twice in the day's hot zones.
Giant slayers: Kills of players 5 or more levels higher.

Camping is killing the same player again within 5 minutes. Camped kills don't count toward challenges or the weekly boards.
Efficiency is your kills divided by your kills plus deaths. It shows once you have 10 confirmed kills and deaths between them.
Duel rating works like a chess rating, and only solo kills move it: the killer gains points, the victim loses them, and beating someone rated higher is worth more. It shows after 5 duels.
Best day uses UTC days. The hour grids and every time on the site use the time zone picked at the bottom of the page, which is US Eastern unless you change it.
Class, race and level need addon 1.1.0 or later. Kills recorded by older versions show as unknown in those filters.

Guilds, zones and fights

A guild's kills are all the kills its members were named in, ranked by the confirmed ones first. Guild efficiency needs 20 kills and deaths, and kills per member needs 5 members seen.
A zone's sheriff is the player with the most killing blows there. Assists don't count.
Battles with 20 or more deaths get a battle report. A battle lasts until 30 minutes go by with no deaths in the zone; fighting after that starts a new one.
A fight is 4 or more deaths in one zone, each within 2 minutes of the last.
A grudge is 3 kills between two players or guilds. It's a rivalry once both sides have at least 2.

Badges

Badges say something about how a player fights, based on every kill they were named in this season. Each one needs at least 5 kills that fit.

Bully: more than half their kills are on players 10 or more levels below them.
Underdog: 5 or more solo kills of players 5 or more levels above them.
Lone Wolf: more than half their kills are solo.
Duo: more than half their kills are as a pair.
Gang: more than half their kills are in a group of three or more.
Serial: five different players killed within ten minutes.
Camper: 5 or more confirmed kills of a player they had just killed.
Field Medic is the only badge that isn't about kills: healed more than they damaged this season, with at least 20,000 healing, going by the desktop app's combat logs.

Levels and group sizes need addon 1.1.0 or later, so older kills don't count toward a badge.

Bully Underdog Lone Wolf Duo Gang Serial Camper Field Medic

Streaks and multi-kills

A streak is killing blows in a row without dying. It ends the next time that player dies, and their page shows it once it reaches 3.

A multi-kill is two or more killing blows by one player, each within 30 seconds of the last: a Double kill, Triple kill, Quad kill, and five or more is a Rampage. Each chain counts once, at its full length.

Only confirmed kills count toward ranked streaks and multi-kills, and camping a corpse never does. Battle reports call out the big moments: multi-kills of three or more and streaks of five or more.

The front

Some zones have a Horde town and an Alliance town at either end of a road, like Tarren Mill and Southshore in Hillsbrad. A battle there gets a front line if both sides spend at least 15 minutes dying in the ground between them.

How the front is found. The site looks at the battle in five-minute slices, using any slice with at least 10 deaths on the map. The biggest cluster of deaths in a slice is the fight, and the front sits halfway between where the Horde died and where the Alliance died. The front's push is how far along the road it is: 0% at the Horde town, 100% at the Alliance town.

A slice counts toward a front when all of these are true:

the push is between 25% and 75%;
both sides died in the fight;
the side that lost fewer still lost at least 3, and at least a quarter of the fight's dead.

Get three slices like that and the battle has a front.

What isn't a front. Fighting inside a neutral town, like Ratchet, Booty Bay, Gadgetzan or Everlook, is fighting at that town. Fighting only at one town's gate, with nothing in the middle, is a raid or siege on that town: its report shows the deaths on the map, and kills decide who won.

Following the front. Once a battle has a front, every slice with 10 deaths near the road moves it, from the start of the battle to the end, even if only one side was dying. That's how you see a side get pushed all the way back to its own doorstep. Slices inside a neutral town never move it. If only one side died where the fighting was, the site uses the other side's deaths elsewhere and marks the point as a rough guess.

On the map, the front is a bar across the road, at its latest push averaged with the slice before. Fainter bars show where it was 10, 20 and 30 minutes earlier, and an arrowhead appears if it moved in the last 15 minutes. Each side's town is its flight master, taken from the game's own data. Where the Alliance has no flight master of its own, its end is the neutral port it flies to: Ratchet in the Barrens and Booty Bay in Stranglethorn.

Who won a battle

A battle keeps going until a zone has gone 30 minutes without a death. Until then it can still swing either way. Once it's over it gets a winner, and anything after that is a new battle.

Battle sizes. Under 100 deaths is a skirmish, 100 to 299 is a battle, and 300 or more is a major battle. When it's over, every battle and skirmish gets a name based on where the fighting was and how it went, like "The Siege of Southshore" or "The Brawl at Azurelode Mine". While it's still going, it's just named after the place: "Fighting at Tarren Mill".

Only battles and major battles make the news. The home page leads with the latest major battle won in the last 24 hours, or the latest battle if there wasn't one, and lists the other battles won that week. Only battles and major battles get a newspaper article or show their result and rounds on the banner. A skirmish in a capital doesn't count as defending or sacking it, and a skirmish in a home zone doesn't count as raiding its town.

Rounds. A battle with a front is fought in rounds. Your side wins a round by keeping the front on the enemy's doorstep for 20 minutes. The doorstep starts 70% of the way to their town, which is about as close as you can hold before their elite guards start chewing you up.

A five-minute slice with the front short of the doorstep restarts the 20 minutes. A few quiet minutes, too quiet to place the front, don't.
Only slices with 15 or more deaths on the map count, and a round needs 60 deaths across its 20 minutes.
Fighting far from the road is somewhere else in the zone and doesn't move the front.
Winners often let the losers come back out, so the same side can't win another round until the front has left the doorstep and been held there for another full 20 minutes. The other side can win a round at any time.

Deciding the winner. We go down this list and stop at the first one that settles it:

Rounds: the side that won more rounds wins. It's decisive if they won at least two more than the loser, or the loser won none; otherwise it's narrow. The battle report keeps score as it goes, and each round shows on the banner when it's won.
Doorstep time: if the rounds are level, the side that held the other's doorstep longer wins.
Where the front ended: if nobody won a round, a front that ended 60% or more of the way to the Alliance town is a Horde win, and 40% or less is an Alliance win. It's decisive if the front ended on the enemy's doorstep (70% or more of the way), and narrow otherwise.
Kills: used when the front ended between 40% and 60%, when rounds and doorstep time were level, and for every battle without a front. A side's kills are all of the other side's deaths, whether or not anyone was named as the killer. A side with 55% or more of the kills wins, decisively at 70% or more. Without a front, a battle needs 20 deaths with a known side, or it's a skirmish with no clear winner.
Damage: if neither side got 55% of the kills, a side that did 55% or more of the damage logged by the desktop apps takes a narrow win, as long as both sides' damage was logged and it adds up to at least 50,000. Healing never decides a battle.
The last 15 minutes of fighting: the side that killed at least 20% more in the 15 minutes up to the last death takes a narrow win.
Otherwise it's a stalemate.

The bar shows the ground each side held at the end, or the kills where there's no front. Under it, VICTORY marks the side that won and DEFEAT the side that lost.

Capitals. When the city's own side wins, it's a defence; when the other side wins, it's a sack; a stalemate means the city holds. Most of the fighting at Undercity happens up in the Ruins of Lordaeron, above the city, so a battle there is an assault on the ruins: a Horde win holds them, and an Alliance win drives the Horde out. Only a battle down in the city itself is a siege of Undercity.

Raids. A zone where only one side has a town, like Westfall (Sentinel Hill) or Silverpine Forest (the Sepulcher), belongs to that side, and any battle there is a raid by the other side: on the town if the fighting was in or near it, otherwise on the zone. A win for the raiders raids the town (or the zone), a win for the home side fights the raid off, and a stalemate means it holds. Raids make the news, but they don't count toward the war.

Your wins. A player's battles won are the battles and major battles their side won that they were named in, as a killer or as one of the dead. Skirmishes are counted separately. Their rounds won are the rounds their side won where they were named while their side held the doorstep. For a guild, a battle or round counts when 3 or more of its members were named.

Outlaws

Get four kills within twenty minutes and you're Wanted, gold on your head or not. Only kills someone else recorded count, so you can't make yourself an outlaw, and camping the same player only counts once.

Your outlaw rank is your kills in the last seven days: Wanted at 4, Notorious at 10, Menace at 25, Public Enemy at 50, and Dead or... Dead at 100. It wears off a week after your last kill. Outlaws show on the Bounties page and their own page, and anyone can still put gold on them in game.

Notoriety

Everyone climbs this ladder over the season: Greenhorn from your first point, then Drifter at 10, Gunslinger at 40, Deputy at 100, Marshal at 250 and Legend at 600. Points come from:

a confirmed killing blow: 3 points;
a witnessed killing blow: 2 points;
an assist: 1 point;
a bounty the poster confirmed: 10 points;
healing: 1 point for every 10,000 healing seen in two or more players' combat logs. The desktop app only counts healing on friendly players who are under enemy attack, and leaves out overhealing.

Kills only your own addon recorded don't earn anything, and nor does anything while your numbers are under review. Everyone starts again at the next season.

Challenges and hot zones

Every day at midnight US Eastern, the site picks two hot zones: one for levels 1 to 15 and one for 16 to 30, from the zones that saw fighting in the past week. Busier zones are more likely to come up, but the busiest one gets its chances cut so the fighting spreads around. A zone is never hot two days running, and capitals and battlegrounds never are. Each day also has a daily challenge, the same for both sides, usually killing blows in one of the hot zones.

What counts. A kill counts toward a challenge if your own Wanted app logged it from the combat log, or another player's records confirmed it. A kill only the addon claimed, with no combat log behind it, doesn't count. These never count:

ganks (killing a player 10 or more levels below you);
killing the same player again within 5 minutes;
kills in battlegrounds and dungeons.

Kills in the day's hot zones count double toward challenges and the Challengers board, and as one kill everywhere else. Finish the daily challenge on back-to-back days to build a streak; miss a day and you start over.

What's kept for good. The weekly medals (Top Killer and Defender), the badge tiers and the achievements count the same kills, with one more limit: kills that only your own combat log recorded count toward them up to 10 a day. Past that, only kills another player's app also recorded count. Your combat log is a file on your computer, and a medal or a badge is never taken back, so one person's word alone can't earn more than that in a day. Challenges aren't limited this way.

Every Monday at midnight US Eastern, three weekly challenges start, aimed at where the fighting is: winning rounds at the busiest front, killing blows in the busiest other zone, and one more. Rounds and battles count for everyone named on the winning side, and bounties count once the poster confirmed the claim and it was paid. Finish all three in a week to get a badge on your player page. The Challengers board ranks how many challenges each player has finished this season.

Ranks and challenge points

Wanted has no ranks of its own. The rank next to a name is that player's Blizzard PvP rank from honor, which their addon reads from the game and shares. Players who don't use Wanted don't show one.

Challenges are just for fun. A daily challenge is worth 5 points, each weekly challenge 10, and all three in one week another 15. Points add up to a weekly score for the boards, which starts again each Monday at midnight US Eastern, and every finished challenge is saved with its points so anyone can check the totals.

Numbers under review

Nobody gets 60 unconfirmed kills in 10 minutes for real. If a player's own records say they did, they go under review: their unconfirmed kills stop counting, and only their confirmed kills rank. A player's own records are the ones their app signed, and any that accounts their name is confirmed linked to uploaded, or made naming them.

Nobody else's records can put you under review. If someone else sends more than 60 of your kills in 10 minutes that nobody confirmed, it's their own characters that go under review, not you.

Confirmed kills never count toward that limit, however fast they come (a mage in a siege with other Wanted players around, say). Kills in two zones close together don't count toward it either, since fighting across a zone border or using a hearthstone does that. A witness record doesn't help here, because anyone can make one up.

The war

The war is fought as influence races every evening, Horde v Alliance, and after launch as guild wars over the zones the races open. How each is counted is on How the war works; tonight's races are on the war page.

Layers. Forever runs each zone as several copies, called layers. The addon says which layer a zone's fight is on and offers a hop there through a group invite from a Wanted player already on it. Horde and Alliance can't talk in game, so the Wanted Battle.net group is the data link between the two sides' addons: through its members, each side's addon learns how many Wanted players are in a zone, by layer, as hidden game data, never chat. Where anyone is never crosses: no names, no positions. The fight's layer is picked automatically, always the zone's most active Wanted PvP layer; nobody chooses one. Members can see each other's BattleTag. Misuse, griefing or bullying gets you banned from the system.

Time windows and updates

Boards show the whole season, the last 7 days or the last 24 hours, and they update every 5 minutes.

Hidden players

Wanted takes online bullying seriously; no one should feel unsafe because of this addon. Misuse, griefing or bullying gets you banned from the system: see Safety. Anyone can hide a character. A hidden character has no page and shows as "Hidden player", but their kills and deaths still count in other players' totals.