Are You The Majority?

Pretty coloured graphs!

I grabbed this picture from GW2 economist John Smith's post on Sept 14th regarding the state of the game's economy. The article itself is kinda meh, but this graph at the end jumped out at me, not just cuz it's super-pretty, but cuz it shows some neat things about the game population.

The top pie chart is simple. More dudes than dudettes. Doh. What I'd like to know is: does the pie chart represent male and female toons or male and female players? I'm guessing toons. (Did some research and yeah, it's toon gender, not player gender.)

The graph on the top left shows the distribution of professions. I'm surprised that ranger isn't number one, seeing as how all the bots use rangers. Warriors being number one is a bit of a surprise to me as I found them kinda...flat. Traditional. Boring. Slow. But maybe they're more useful and interesting than I believe, or maybe it's just that the blandness of the name gives people confidence that they can play it. Does that make sense? What I mean is everyone knows what a warrior DOES. They swing swords. They kill stuff. Not everyone would be willing to choose necro or guardian from the list. They sound more complicated and less familiar.
Spiral is a mesmer, tied for the least played profession with engineer. I can understand why folks don't choose mesmer to begin with. It's an odd name and the mesmer description sounds vague and, well, pansy. There's no mention of power or strength or awesome-sauce. It talks about deception and illusions.
On top of that, anyone daring enough to make a mesmer finds out pretty quickly that they are a difficult class to play. Took me a long time to feel like I had the hang of it, whereas jumping on a thief or an ele or a warrior, you "get it" right away.
On top of that, mesmers are really a support class, I'm finding, and when I play my alts I realize how slow she is at killing mobs! But I don't care. She's mine and she's my favourite and I love bringing my mesmer skills into dungeons and group events to shake things up.

The bottom left graph is the races. Humans is represented by the tall green bar. (I think that's an icon of Divinity's Reach.) So...why are so many people choosing humans? Honestly, I thought they were the least interesting of the races on looks (my friend, Fearil, called human males "foppish"), and were the only race playable in GW1. Peter Fries, a GW2 writer, saw this graph and tweeted about it, saying the Asura and Charr storylines are pretty freaking awesome and those lame-ohs playing humans are "missing out".
Besides the storylines though, why wouldn't you choose to be an entirely new race? I mean, we're gaming to escape reality, aren't we? Why not be a cat or a tree or a midget or a giant?

The last graph on the bottom right is the crafting professions. Hmm, big hate on for Artificer. Wonder why that is? Weaponsmithing is number one, no surprise there. The rest are pretty balanced. I thought everyone and their uncle was a chef, judging by the pack of toons clustered around the cooking station everyday, but I guess chefs are no more popular than leatherworker, jeweler and tailor.

Anyway, do you fall into the norm of these graphs? Are you an outlier, playing a female Asura Mesmer who makes scepters? Does seeing this graph make you want to make an alt? It does for me! I gotta go...