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July 17, 2005
Guild Size
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High)
Sampling Period: 6/13/2005 9:00 am - 6/20/2005 9:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~14 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique guild. Each guild was tracked and every character with that guild tag was counted in the tabulation over the one week period.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 2,728 guilds
17.5% of characters were observed to be in a guild that no one else was observed to be in during the one week period - i.e., a one-person guild. The average guild size was 14.5 (16.8 if one-person guilds are excluded). The median was 6 (9 if one-person guilds are excluded). The largest observed guild had 257 members. The lower quartile is 2. The upper quartile is 16. The 90th percentile was 35. The 95th percentile was 54. The 99th percentile was 110.
The graphs below are presented as a complement to Christopher Allen's interesting article on Dunbar's number.
In this graph below, each guild is represented once and sorted in ascending order.
In this graph, the frequency of each guild size is shown.
Posted at July 17, 2005 02:22 PM
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Comments
A suggestion? Have you considered creating a brief survey for each/most/any of your data postings? Many game and gamer sites have discovered PlayOn, and while such a survey could hardly be considered scientific or rigorous, it might lend at least a bit more insight into the statistics you're collecting.
It looks like you're using Moveable Type, so if you guys don't have a Perl programmer, it would be tricky to incorporate it directly (although, after all, not like PARC is exactly *lacking* in programmers), but there are a zillion other online services and scripts that would allow you to do so in just a couple minutes.
For my sake, I know I'd be happy to answer a couple of questions about my relationship to the data here, and absolutely 100% of the gamers I know are generally more than willing to talk (loudly) about their experiences :)
Posted by: babylona at July 19, 2005 12:06 PM
Any chance I can get this raw data, or for you to do a chart like the one on my Dunbar Number posting of Ultima Online guild sizes?
Posted by: Christopher Allen at July 24, 2005 01:29 AM
Thanks for the charts, very useful. What would the numbers above be if you excluded all the guilds of one? I imagine it signicantly skews the median.
It is interesting to me that the 'knee' here is much closer to 50 rather then 150 as in Ultima Online, which matches my own predictions. Are there any game design reasons why groups and 50 or less are easier? User interface? Hunting group limits?
Posted by: Christopher Allen at July 25, 2005 03:25 PM
Chris, a part of the difference is almost certainyl that UO uses that "veteran member" method of counting. That means virtually everything is underreported.
Posted by: Raph Koster at July 28, 2005 03:59 PM
I caught an error while re-running the stats for size > 1.
The actual mean should be 14.5 (for all guilds) and 16.8 for guilds with more than 1 person.
Posted by: Nick Yee at July 29, 2005 12:10 PM