PARC blog » PlayOn authors archive

PlayOn 2.0: Number of characters and level

PlayOn authors archive — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:30:23 +0000

How do people split up their time among all their characters? Are some players more focused players than others? Let's find out. [Go to Full Article]

Collaborative building in Second Life

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:27:30 +0000

When people build things together in real life, they frequently have to collaborate synchronously around individual objects: for example one person might hold two pieces of wood in place while another screws them together. In previous research, users were sometimes forced to collaborate in this way, by implementing gravity and friction into the virtual environment. But gravity and friction are usually not necessary in virtual worlds. Experienced Second Life builders make use of the fact that objects will stay hanging in the air, or even pass through other objects. Rather than force real-world modes of collaboration, it might be better to embrace the non-physicality of virtual worlds, allowing people to avoid the kind of synchronous 3d collaboration that the physical world forces upon them. Rather than tweak the environment to force real-world styles of collaboration, more might be gained by improving aspects of collaboration that users find troublesome, such as the permission system which currently prevents objects which have been made by different individuals from being linked together.

Why hair matters

PlayOn authors archive — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:17:05 +0000

In our previous post, we saw how hair style and color were consistently ranked among the most important avatar customization features. They were also the ones users spent the most time customizing. We would like to explore a few reasons why this might be the case and what the implications for future avatar creation and customization systems might be – read on for more.

First, it is worth noting that hair being a “malleable” part of the human body, it is often used in real life to control and build an individual’s personality. Hair styles like dreadlocks, for instance, can be used as identity markers signaling membership in a particular group; hair length and color can be manipulated to dramatically affect someone’s look, sometimes even to the point of making them hard to recognize (note how changes in hair style are often the first consideration of someone attempting to...

What are the most important avatar customization features?

PlayOn authors archive — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:45:03 +0000

Avatar customization systems vary greatly across virtual worlds: some allow users to customize a few high-level features from a limited list of options, while others give the users almost total control over their appearance. We wanted to assess the relative importance of each customization feature to uncover which parts of a user’s virtual body matter most to them. To do so, we asked players in each of our three games to evaluate the importance (1: not important to 5: essential) of each character design feature provided by the avatar customization system in their environment of choice. Also, participants were asked to answer how much time they spent customizing each of those features (1 = almost none, 5 = a great deal). The results were more surprising than we anticipated – read more below for a detailed description of our findings.

Our results showed that the most important avatar customization...

Avatar survey: Time spent in-world and customizing avatar

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:51:08 +0000

Gaming experience and time spent playing were not significantly different across the three environments. WoW players had a mean experience with this particular game of 2.15 years (Std. = 1.16). They played 4.36 hours per day (Std. = 2.32) and 5.53 days per week (Std. = 1.67). Maple Story players had a mean experience of 1.82 years (Std. = 0.98); they played 5.12 hours per day (Std. = 4.16) and 5.60 days per week (Std. = 1.88). Second Life residents had a mean experience of 1.71 years (Std. = 1.01); they played 4.55 hours per day (Std. = 3.56) and 5.91 days per week (Std.=5.91). Note that our respondents’ experience was not limited to these three environments: their total MMO gaming experience ranged from an average of 3.5 years for MS players to 4.4 years for WoW.

However, Second Life residents spent significantly more time (F=9.434, p <.001) customizing the...

Avatar survey: “Mains” and “alts”

PlayOn authors archive — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:13:54 +0000

Before asking our participants detailed questions about how they chose to customize their avatar, it was important to assess whether or not they had one they considered to be their “main” identity (as opposed to alternate characters or “alts”). Indeed, if participants split their time between several avatars it would be more difficult to link their in-world appearance with their physical world demographics. Broadly speaking, we found that a large majority of users across the three environments focus their energy on one main avatar. The extended entry below presents our findings in more detail.

We found that many users own multiple characters on their accounts: an average of 8.08 (Std. =7.80) avatars per account. Specifically, WoW players have an average of 12.30 (Std. = 8.89) avatars and Maple Story players have an average of 5.22 (Std. = 3.91). Because Second Life allows user to create only one avatar per...

Avatar survey: Age

PlayOn authors archive — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:29:38 +0000

Having considered gender in the previous post, we now turn to our participants’ age. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the participants’ age in the three selected games had significantly different means (F = 67.479, p <.001). The results indicate that Maple Story players (mean age = 18.12, Std. = 6.18) were significantly younger than both the players in World of Warcraft (mean age = 29.78, Std. = 10.48) and the residents of Second Life (mean age = 41.14, Std. = 9.64). In addition, the residents of Second Life were found to be significantly older than the other two games.

We were able to explore the issue of age in more depth thanks to the avatar screenshots uploaded by our participants. Indeed, users can choose to design their avatar to look younger or older than their real age. In our survey the participants were asked how the age of their avatar compared with their...

Avatar survey: Gender demographics

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:40:13 +0000

After several months of data collection we have begun analyzing the responses to our survey on avatar customization. A big thank you goes to the 180 participants who took the time to go through the questionnaire and provided us with some very interesting information! In the coming weeks we will be posting regularly about what emerges from our analyses.

In this post, we will start with some basic demographic data about our participants, in particular, their gender. While this is not directly related to avatar customization per se, it gives us a sense of how representative our sample is. Interestingly, our participants data broadly confirms the player profiles that have been reported by others in previous research and in industry data. Read on to learn more.

During three months of data collection, 180 participants (89 for World of Warcraft, 50 from Second Life, and 41 from Maple Story) have...

Survey: How do players create and customize their avatars?

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:25:25 +0000

The PlayOn group is starting a research project on avatar personalization systems in multiplayer games, including World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Maple Story. As part of this research we would like to invite volunteers to participate in an online survey.

The purpose of this study is to explore how users of massively multiplayer online environments customize the appearance of their virtual body (avatar). During this survey, you will be asked to upload a screenshot of your avatar’s appearance to our research website and to answer survey questions related to your gaming experience. The questionnaire should be fun to answer and we estimate it takes only 15 to 20 minutes to complete it.

If you’d like to help, please follow the links below depending on your game of choice:
- World of Warcraft: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=59117&lang=en]
- Maple Story: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=77654&lang=en]
- Second Life: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=35489&lang=en]

Note that you will...

Guild name generator

PlayOn authors archive — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 09:10:12 +0000

In our analysis of guild names, we found that a basic grammar was able to parse about 90% of the names. This allowed us to create a guild name generator that used the grammar to create new guild names based on the weighted vocabulary of World of Warcraft guild names.

See full article for description of the guild name grammar we used.

Description of Guild Name Grammar
< > denotes parts of speech
[ ] denotes optional elements
1. Singletons
- [The] <Noun> / <Adjective>
- e.g., Chaos, Brutality, The Wicked, The Legion
2. Simple Noun Phrase
- [The] <Adjective> <Noun>
- e.g., Eternal Angels, The Swinging Swords
3. Complex Noun Phrase
- [The] <Two Word Adjective> <Noun>
- e.g., Pretty Pink Gnomes, The Blood Knuckle Pirates
4. “Of” / “In” Construction
- [The] <Group Term> of [the] [<Adjective>] <Noun>

PvP vs. PvE: Pressure to Level

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:15:15 +0000

After looking at the data on general post-BC leveling patterns and speed, we wondered whether the post-60 distribution would differ between PvP and PvE servers. I suggested that it might be harder to level on a PvP server because of the general level of ganking and interference. Eric suggested that the potential for ganking would actually encourage PvP players to level as fast as possible – especially to stay ahead of the level curve. The data showed that Eric was right.
On both PvP and PvE servers, roughly 20% of the population was level 61 and above, but the distribution was significantly different. Players on PvP servers tended to be higher level than players on PvE servers. The graph below shows how clean that break is. The difference is especially clear for level 65 and above, and particularly for level 70.

Now, one alternative explanation is that players...

Accumulated Leveling Times

PlayOn authors archive — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:40:43 +0000

The timing of the expansion gave us a very interesting opportunity to estimate leveling times. In the past, we could estimate each individual leveling event, but it was impossible to know the accumulated leveling time of a character if the character was created before we started capturing snapshots. But even if we only included characters created after the snapshots began, we would have to aggregate across different months to get a sizeable pool of characters, and that introduced potential time event confounds (i.e., a certain class was balanced).

What the expansion did was it encouraged many players to start a new character at the same time – specifically with the Draenei and the Blood Elves. We know that all Draenei and Blood Elves were created after January 17th, and there are many of these characters. This allowed us to use a large sample of actually accumulated leveling times to...

Characters in BGs after Burning Crusade

PlayOn authors archive — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 23:39:31 +0000

The Burning Crusade changed the WoW landscape a lot. One area that was significantly impacted was the number of unique characters in the old BGs (Alterac, Ararthi, Warsong, & Eye of The Storm). The end-game BGs which many level 60 characters spent time in were suddenly almost deserted and back at almost pre-cross-realm queue times. Now, it’s intuitive that post-60 content is more appealing to many players than the same old BGs. What may be less obvious is the added pressure for those level 60 players to get the expansion pack. Level 60 players who were content to just PvP now have to endure much much longer wait times to get into BGs. In other words, level 60 life without the expansion pack became difficult. Anecdotally, it also soon became clear to the BG stragglers that the people stuck in those BGs were the ones who didn’t have the expansion...

New Races Level Progression

PlayOn authors archive — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 00:34:02 +0000

We tabulated the levels of all the characters of the two races for each day in January after the expansion roll-out. The following flash widget shows the average level progression by day for the Draenei and the Blood Elves across the 5 servers we monitor.

PLEASE NO OPEN CHAT IN THE GROUP

PlayOn authors archive — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:06:32 +0000

So why is using group chat in Second Life considered such a crime? Why aren't Second Lifers using group chat to stay in touch with their online families like players in other MMOs?

PvP Ranks Change (Basic)

PlayOn authors archive — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:52:21 +0000

After looking at PvP ranks in one week of time, we decided to explore the changes in PvP rank over time. For this, we took two consecutive one-week periods to calculate the PvP rank change. We start here by providing a sense for how much of the player base we were able to capture.

Of the 128,354 characters, we had PvP rank information for both weeks for 41,997 characters. This turns out to be about 57% of all characters above level 45 (i.e., the average level of Rank 1 characters). While this is only about half of all possible characters, it is large enough of a sample to explore some of the underlying differences.

We found that most characters (80%) do not change rank over a one week period. About 5.5% lost rank and 13.5% gained rank. As the graph below shows, most of the changes occur in...

PvP Ranks (by Race / Faction)

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:38:26 +0000

We also looked at PvP ranks by race and faction. Both analyses showed a similar pattern; Horde characters are on average a higher PvP rank than Alliance characters. For example, the graph below plots out the distribution of PvP rank by the two factions. Alliance has more low-ranked characters (Rank 3 and below), while Horde has more high-ranked characters (Rank 4 and above).

The same pattern emerged from the analysis by race. The four Horde races are higher ranked than the four Alliance races – small differences that nonetheless provide a striking division.

There are several reasons for why we might be seeing this pattern:
1) Practice: The Alliance-Horde imbalance (2:1 in our sample) makes it easier for Horde characters to enter PvP BGs. This means that given the same amount of play-time, Horde has less wait time, and thus more practice. This...

PvP Ranks Change (by Race)

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:30:54 +0000

The data also allowed us to explore differences in PvP rank change by race. Consistent with what we had seen before when looking at the average rank of each race, Horde races tend to come out ahead. In other words, characters on the Horde side are more likely to gain rank from week to week than characters on the Alliance side. The differences seen here are consistent with data here and elsewhere that have shown that players who choose Horde are more goal-oriented than players who choose to play Alliance.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Two consecutive one-week periods in October, both starting on Tuesday at 10am pacific time (i.e., after ranks have been calculated for that week).
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character in each hour of the day.

PvP Ranks Change (by Class)

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:29:55 +0000

The data also allowed us to look at rank changes by class. Below, we plot out the likelihood to gain rank by class. What’s striking is the spike for the Shaman class. Again, this is consistent with what we had found before in the average ranks for each class. The points we made then about potential reasons for this also apply here. While it may be tempting to attribute class imbalances to this difference, it bears pointing out that players who choose to play Shamans may be different (personality/motivation) than players who choose other classes.

PvP Ranks Change (Time Spent)

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:28:22 +0000

Whereas we have previously reported the average time that characters at each different rank spends in the game, that data wasn’t able to take into account whether they were trying to reach the next rank or not. Now that we have rank change data, we can provide a better picture of how much time it takes to gain rank for each PvP rank.

To do this, we separated the characters into 3 groups:
- Characters whose rank did not change.
- Characters who gained rank.
- Characters who lost rank.

We then plotted the time spent in the game the week before for each character rank for each of those three groups. Thus, when we now plot the graph for characters who have gained rank, the time spent is a much better indicator of how much time it takes to grind each rank.

...

The social utility of jerks

PlayOn authors archive — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 01:13:00 +0000

The biggest draw for MMOGs is obviously the MM part. Players enjoy participating in a persistent, multi-user world; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t pay subscriptions to do so when there are plenty of single-player video games available. Ironically, however, the same fellow users who make MMOGs so appealing can also be one of their biggest headaches. Unwelcome behaviors range from trash talk and verbal harassment to hardcore griefing like camping in order to kill newbies over and over again. Most companies will institute sanctions such as account suspensions against egregious offenders, but a lot of behavior, such as inequitable loot sharing and excessive aggro that gets everybody killed, falls into a grey area of “jerky, but probably not actionable.”

Richard Bartle, in his description of player types in virtual worlds, claimed that “killers,” analogous to griefers, provide a challenge for achievement-motivated players but depress the population of socializers in a...

PvP Ranks (by Class)

PlayOn authors archive — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:40:53 +0000

And finally, we also looked at the differences in PvP rank by class. Like the differences of PvP rank by race, the differences were quite small. Shamans had on average the highest rank, while Priests had on average the lowest rank.

It was interesting that 3 of the healing classes (Priests, Druids, Paladins) were on the bottom of the list, while the final healing class (Shamans) were on the top of the list. Part of the reason why may be that the Shaman attracts more competitive-minded players.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: One Week in October 2006
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character in each hour of the day.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 128,477 characters

PvP Ranks (by Hours Played)

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:35:52 +0000

In the same way that we could approximate the number of hours played it is necessary to get from one level to the next, we could also approximate how many hours of play per week it takes to advance from one PvP rank to the next. We tabulated the average number of hours played for characters in each PvP rank. Of course, the numbers derived do not correspond directly to the time it takes to reach the next PvP rank, but they are indicative of the time invested as players are at higher and higher PvP ranks. The following is the graph we got from that analysis.

Data from The Daedalus Project suggests that the average MMO player spends about 20 hours a week in the game. This implies that the average player “hit a ceiling” around Rank 5 (Sergeant Major / First Sergeant). They will find it...

PvP Ranks (Basic)

PlayOn authors archive — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:28:53 +0000

Eric had recently included a PvP rank scraper into the census script. Because PvP rank is not one of the variables that is returned via the /who list, this data was collected using the method used to scrape character gender. We gathered PvP rank data by moving collection characters to the faction capitals (Ogrimmar & Ironforge). As the character census occurs, the collection character tries to target each character seen in the census. If they happen to be nearby, we note down their census rank. As discussed in the character gender thread, this method has several biases. We’re more likely to find the PvP ranks of players who: 1) play a lot, and 2) spend a lot of time in the main cities. On the other hand, given the way that PvP is currently structured (via queues originating in the main cities), the sampling bias may dovetail with the...

On the internet everyone knows you’re not actually an elf.

PlayOn authors archive — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:02:14 +0000

Lisa Nakamura has written extensively about race and identity tourism in virtual environments. She argues that in most cyber social spaces, the surface absence of race is an implicit assumption of default whiteness. The textual environment LambdaMOO, for instance, requires users to set a character gender (although “neuter” is available); although players may choose to include it in their character description, race “is not even on the menu” as far as the interface is concerned (Nakamura 1999). Today’s MMOGs, however, make race explicit insofar as one cannot create a “colorless” virtual avatar–although most games offer some non-human options ranging from elves to cow, rat, and lizard people. As something that is visually available to all players and generally considered integral to personal identity in the mainstream culture, race, whether human or fantasy, seems to offer a particularly valuable resource for role-playing (RP) in game spaces.

Despite the possibility of...