There are 24 races to choose from in WoW if you include all Allied Races. However, it seems a small number of them comprise a big chunk of the population, and the pointy-eared ones are very much on top!
Elf Supremacy
As Fleeeeemme recently commented, elves have been on top of the race charts for a long time now. Over a third of all characters on Data for Azeroth are elves! That’s right, 33.5% are some flavor of elf. Now, you might argue that’s simply because there are so many flavors of elf to be had, with four actual races on the list. However, even if we pare it down to just the main two, the percentage still sits at a huge 26.9! Blood Elves reign supreme, as they have for a long time now, sitting at 14.6%, just 2.3% higher than the OG Night variety, with humans at a distant third at 10.3%.
And here’s that same chart, but excluding non-max level characters, where the elves are even more numerous!
Data Validity and Accuracy
The numbers come from Data for Azeroth, which does not have information on all WoW players. They track the number of individual characters, so alts are included. They scan guild rosters, Hall of Fame leaderboards, PvP leaderboards, Mythic+ leaderboards, and similar sources to add more and more chars to their lists. Players can also add their characters manually. And so the accuracy of the data relating to the overall game depends on how much the percentages of this subset of characters are similar to the overall population, which we can’t be certain of.
Why So Many?
There are many reasons the numbers are so high, so you can’t really narrow it down to just one. Or can you? The most obvious one is pretty basic: Blizzard just keep adding more elf races! But even if we count them individually, they still win, so what else is there? Well, the simplest explanation is just that they look good. Both in terms of their physicality, but also in terms of how transmog looks on them. They don’t have that much clipping and gear generally looks pretty good on them.
Then there’s the more practical reasons. Blood Elves had one of the best racials in the game for a long time, as 
Arcane Torrent was very strong until the nerfs. They were also the only “normal/pretty” race for the Horde for a long time AND they were the only ones that could be Paladins! That’s a whole lot of reasons. Night Elves were the original most-played before BC, and their racial 
Shadowmeld is actually still pretty solid today, especially if you really want to get out of combat fast. And let’s not forget Demon Hunters, as you have to be one of the top two elf groups to play one. They also have a pretty solid variety of classes to choose from, 10, with 11 being the most any race can pick. And then there’s also the Night Elf flip minigame – how many can you get in a row?
There are many more potential reasons for their popularity, as players have plenty listed over in the Reddit thread, so which ones do you think are the most impactful?
