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November 04, 2005
Rate of Advancement (Overview)
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 8/01/2005 12:00 am - 8/30/2005 12:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~12 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: See below
Sample Size: 241,378 characters
We wanted to explore level advancement at a character level. In other words, a true sense of how much a character levels over a one month period. This also provides an approximation of the player's achievement motivation - how much they want to advance their character as quickly as possible. To do this, we looked at the first 10 days of the month and the last 10 days of the month and included only those characters that were observed in both periods. This was done so that we did not include new characters that started towards the end of the month - who presumably would have had less time to advance than those characters that were already there at the beginning of the month. This sampling method yielded 83,020 characters. We calculated a standardized measure of level advancement as follows.
Standardized Character Advancement Score: A character's raw advancement is simply the number of levels the character has advanced. In this case, we subtracted the starting level from the ending level (end of month - beginning of month). The problem is that over a one month period, a 10 level advancement by a level 1 character is much less significant than a 10 level advancement by a level 50 character. In other words, the advancement needs to be qualified by the starting level somehow. The method we used to standardize character advancement was to calculate the average (and standard deviation) of advancement for every starting level. In other words, compared with other characters who also started at level 10, were you above, below, or right on the curve? Mathematically, we did this by calculating the z-score of advancement for every character.
There were two large groups of characters that were excluded in this analysis. First, we excluded all characters who spent over 90% of their time in a city. We presumed that these were mules of one kind or another and they would simply introduce too much noise. 6,393 (or 7%) of the original sample were excluded this way. Then we excluded all characters who were already level 60 since by definition they couldn't advance anymore. This further excluded 14,408 (or 18.8%) of the remaining sample. Thus, we ended up with a sample of 62,035 characters. The means and standard deviations used to calculate the standardized scores were actually derived from this sample so we were making consistent comparisons.
Here is the plot of average level advancement over August by the starting level. We also have the full table of means and standard deviations below. We're using this article to set the stage for level advancement differences by server, class, and race.
Posted at November 4, 2005 02:49 PM
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