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June 17, 2005
Grouping and Soloing
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High)
Sampling Period: 6/2/2005 6:00 pm - 6/7/2005 3:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~16 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character. Each character was tracked across the server logs. Total playing time, lowest observed level, highest observed level, guild affiliation, and zones seen in were parsed.
Data Filter: Characters who were observed for at least 5 hours during sampling period.
Sample Size: 30,278 characters
After getting the grouping ratios, we were also interested to find out the distribution of grouping ratios at different levels. To give a sense of the proportion of players who were never observed in a group, here's a histogram of grouping ratio for players who were observed to play at least 5 hours in the sampling period (N = 30,278).
Here is the same histogram but only for players under level 30 (N = 13,009). 16% of characters were never observed to be in a group.
And here is the same histogram but only for players above level 55 (N = 8,873). 3% of characters were never observed to be in a group.
Posted at June 17, 2005 03:04 PM
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Comments
What are the psychographics of those who "group" vs. those who do not "group"? Any research on that yet?
adam
Posted by: Adam Carstens at June 17, 2005 06:26 PM
Good stuff -- this is very interesting!
Just as a quick note, it's unusual to see that only "3% of [55+] characters were never observed to be in a group"
I would have expected a much higher percent of non-groupers, given that the mean grouping ratios shown in Thursday's analysis was quite low (ranging from 0.25 in warlocks to 0.35 for priests)
Posted by: David at June 17, 2005 07:57 PM
Hey Adam - The client-side data doesn't provide us direct ways of getting data of players (naturally), but I can refer to you to my survey data: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001299.php. Preference for grouping (the teamwork motivation) doesn't differ by gender. Among male players, it is mildly negatively correlated with age. I'll see if I can poke around that data more.
Re: David - the Thursday data covers all characters from level 1 to 60, thereby making that average grouping much lower than if we only take 55+ into account. The relative differences among classes are stable through the levels. So even in the 55+, the priests group more than the warlocks. I'll try to put a posting on individual class grouping ratios across level next week.
Posted by: Nick Yee at June 17, 2005 09:23 PM
Ah, that explains it -- my bad, I didn't consider the level spread in Thursday's data.
Thanks for taking the time to explain these results :)
Posted by: David at June 18, 2005 04:43 AM