WHODAT

Experiment 02 — designated WhoDAT — began as a modest ambition: give the operator a complete, persistent, exportable record of everything their character has ever done. What was earned. What was lost. What the auction house did to you on Tuesday. The experiment has since grown considerably. The ambition has not shrunk.

WhoDAT is a World of Warcraft AddOn — a precision-engineered character data collection apparatus that runs silently in the background, cataloguing your every move. Money gained and spent, tracked as a time series. Combat DPS and healing recorded per-encounter. Quest completion, gear snapshots, raid lockouts, deaths, loot drops, guild bank transactions — all of it captured, normalized, and written into a structured SavedVariables database that persists between sessions, forever, until you tell it to stop. It will not suggest stopping.

At logout, WhoDAT performs a chunked export of the full dataset — intelligently diffing against prior exports to identify only what has changed, then writing the results in a format ready for external tools. The WhoDAT Uploader catches it on the other side and feeds it into the backend. WhoDASH renders it into something a human can understand. WhoDAT itself does not care about any of that. It simply logs. Continuously. Without complaint.

Researchers have noted that prolonged use produces a peculiar effect: operators develop an accurate, data-backed understanding of exactly how poor their gold management actually is. The gold-per-hour graphs are illuminating. The death-by-same-mob graphs are more illuminating still. None of this was a design goal. It was, however, inevitable.