archive for the ‘virtual worlds (PlayOn)’ category

PvP vs. PvE: Pressure to Level

12 March 2007 | PlayOn authors archive

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

2 March 2007 | PlayOn authors archive

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

21 February 2007 | PlayOn authors archive

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

9 February 2007 | PlayOn authors archive

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***

19 December 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

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)

29 November 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

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)

12 November 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

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)

12 November 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

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)

12 November 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

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.

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...

PvP Ranks Change (Time Spent)

12 November 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

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.

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