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June 19, 2005
Zone Count
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: None
Sample Size: 62,962 characters
Every log sample contains the zone that the character was observed in. The parsing script counted the number of different zones that each character was observed to be in during the sampling period (4 days and 9 hours).
Zone count increased gradually over level with a noticeable spike at level 39. This matches the spike in playing time. Also of interest is the dip at level 60. Our guesses are that most level 60 characters spend more time consistently in the same instance dungeons.
Because playing time correlates highly with zone count (r = .80), we present the same plot of level against average zone count but with effect of playing time controlled for. We see the same trends pre-40 and post-60 that we observed before. In fact, both become a little more clear.
Addendum:
After reading the comments, we redid the analysis and only counted a zone if a character was observed in it in for two contiguous snapshots. This effectively filters out zones counted before that were being traveled through. We see the same pattern as before - a a spike pre-40 and a drop at lvl 60.
The graph below has playing time controlled for.
Posted at June 19, 2005 11:56 AM
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Comments
This doesn't exclude people passing through a zone very briefly especially by gryphon... Maybe you should do this again but look for people being in a zone two occurences in a scan? I think that would be a lot more interesting...
Posted by: Hmmmm at June 23, 2005 11:02 AM
yea i think that for 60's(knowing how i am) that the zone would be a lower amount if you could somehow exclude the travelling through zones... all the zones in your way as you ge tto the zone you're farming in, or the instance you're going to
Posted by: drypulse at June 24, 2005 10:35 AM
could you PLEASE do some stats for the zones?
would be very interesting how populated the zones are at times!
Posted by: Badmaster at July 16, 2005 04:43 PM
Badmaster: We've eyeballed this data, and you're right that it is quite interesting. (You wouldn't believe how populated STV is. Well, maybe you would.) Coming up with an effective way to visualize this is more difficult.
Posted by: eric at July 19, 2005 10:35 AM
create graphs for all zones and filter out the travelers just passing through. then render a "pie chart"(dunno if thats correctly translated) for each horde and alliance and both of them how busy zones are. also you could try to take the size of the zones into the calculation.
i would love to do it myself but all this LUA stuff looks really messed up :P
Posted by: Badmaster at July 20, 2005 05:22 AM