PlayOn 2.0 is a new longitudinal study of WoW players led by Nick Yee and Nic Ducheneaut at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). We hope to blog about many of our findings here. Read this article to find out more about what we’re up to and the overall design of the study itself.

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Read about and participate in the new phase of our research study.

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We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the US and HK+TW phase of the study. We’re now winding down on the data analysis of Phase 1 and preparing the design of Phase 2 (targeting mainland China and the EU). As such, there won’t be any regular blog posts for a while as we ramp up for Phase 2. Again, a big thank you to everyone who was a part of the Phase 1 study.

Tracking guild affiliations over time lets us count how often players change guilds. The data gives some clues as to how demographic make-up of guilds might influence guild stability.

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Tracking from in-game and the Armory lets us look at how many days and hours players spend each month in the game. Here we take a look at age and gender differences.

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What does frequent flying (via flight paths) say about a player?

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What races do players select when they gender-bend? Is the distribution of these races similar to or different from when they play characters of the same gender? Let’s see if this data helps us understand why players gender-bend.

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In this post, we take a look at how often players participate in Arenas and how often they win Arena matches. We also present gender, age, and regional differences.

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What do respecs tell you about a player? Here we take a look at number of respecs and how that relates to gender, age, and game-play motivations.

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We’ve looked at character roles before, but here’s a post on character classes directly.

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The Armory keeps track of how many times you’ve entered raid dungeons and how many times you’ve died in raid dungeons. These numbers let us calculate a ratio of dungeon deaths for players. Are certain players more likely to die in dungeons than others? And if so, is it linked to the character roles (tanks vs. healers) they are playing? We dig a little deeper than usual in this article to untangle some interesting findings.

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The Armory data keeps a tally of every single greed and need roll your character has ever made. Do some players roll need more frequently than other players? Come find out who the needy players are.

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The average WoW player has 40 vanity pets on their primary character. Imagine if Blizzard let you have all of them out at the same time. We found a gender difference, but no age or region difference. Come read all about it.

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The average WoW player has fallen to death 37 times. What does falling to your death tell us about your personality? And what players are more likely to fall to death in WoW? Come find out what death means in a world of immortals.

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The average WoW player has 32 mounts on their primary character. For players who don’t collect mounts, it may come as a surprise that you can have up to 159 mounts on a single character in WoW. Read this article to learn more about what the data looks like when we slice it by gender, age, and region.

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Are women really more likely to play Night Elves and Blood Elves? And what about men? Do they have preferences for particular WoW races? Read this article to find out.

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The Armory keeps track of every single kill your characters have made, and parses these kills out in many ways, including PvE vs. PvP kills. By calculating the ratio of PvP kills to overall kills, we can get a sense of the PvP inclinations of players themselves.

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Do women really prefer to play healers? Are there demographic differences behind DPS and Tanks? We parsed through class and talent specs to find that answer for you.

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The Achievements system covers many aspects of the game, and provides a sense of whether players prefer to do different things in the game. For example, the data allows us to examine who is more likely to spend time exploring the world, or leveling up crafting professions.

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The Armory keeps a count of certain emotes used by each character, such as hugs. This allows us to figure out how often players use positive emotes across all their characters. Who do you think is giving out the most hugs in WoW?

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The Armory keeps track of every point of damage and healing done for each character. So is it true that women prefer to heal? The results might just surprise you.

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Do younger players prefer the Horde? Are there gender or regional differences in faction selection? Come find out.

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Since every piece of gear has an item level associated with it, it’s straight-forward to calculate a gear score total for every character. The interesting question is whether there are any age, gender, or regional differences in gear score. We’ve got those answers for you here.

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WoW players can play the game in very different ways. Some are focused on getting bigger points (whether in damage, or healing, or gold). Some want to know the story at the end of the quest. Others like to hang out with their friends. How much does gender or age play into these game-play motivations? And do these patterns hold when we look at other cultures?

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In this post, we go over the basic demographics of our participant pool to ground our findings. We also compare our demographics with known benchmarks from other studies.

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Our in-game data collection infrastructure leverages virtual machines and custom load-distribution software to optimize coverage across WoW’s 280 servers.

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How do people split up their time among all their characters? Are some players more focused players than others? Let’s find out.

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When you meet female avatars in the game, how often are they played by men? And do men really gender-bend as often as people think? What about women? Read this article to find out.

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