There's so much needed to run a powerhouse like World of Warcraft, but sometimes we just have no idea. Gamasutra has an article where they talk about the numbers behind the hit MMORPG, and the least we can say is that some of them are astonishing!

Within the World of Warcraft team at Blizzard, there are 30 department leads. The programming department currently consists of 32 people, responsible for some 5.5 million lines of code. The art department is currently sitting at 51 people, responsible for some 1.5 million assets. The Production department is only 10 members strong and managed 33,000 tasks in the last ten years. The design department, 37 members strong, has created some 70,000 spells and some 40,000 NPCs over the years.

The customer support staff is made up of a group with 2,056 game masters, 340 billing managers, and a host of other background staffers. These tireless staffers also work from locations around the world, ensuring that any local variations in culture (or the game) are respected.

There are now 12,000,000 Battle.net accounts, and to date the players have unlocked some 4,449,680,399 rewards.

To make World of Warcraft work, Blizzard utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4600 people.

Impressive numbers. Read the whole article for other interesting facts.