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December 05, 2005
Gender Scraping (Overview)
For some time now, we've been experimenting with ways to track the gender of characters in addition to the other variables we've been tracking. Unfortunately, because of the way that Blizzard has constructed the programming interface accessible to the modding community, character gender is not as conveniently available as, say, the character's level. As a result, we can't reliably determine the gender of all characters we have in the census. In effect, the game only allows us to determine a character's gender if it's possible to target them.
So our strategy has been to move our collection characters to the faction capitals (Ironforge and Orgrimmar), and as the census scraper takes the census, we try to target each character seen in the census. If they happen to be near the auction house at this time, we record their gender. This method has two inherent biases. We're more likely to know a character's gender: 1) the more they play, and 2) the higher level they are. The following chart of character levels and whether we know their gender illustrates this bias.
As a character is played more, and becomes higher level, it becomes more and more likely that we'll have seen them at least once while we were collecting a census. On the servers we're watching, we know the genders of 44% of all characters, and the likelihood that we know their gender rises to about 80% by the time the character is level 50. And overall, the characters we know the genders of play about 3-4 times more than the characters we don't know the genders of.
Nevertheless, the results are provocative, and at the same time will confirm the sensibilities of any experienced WoW player. No real surprises, but it's still fascinating to see the results as hard, cold numbers.
And the results? Stay tuned...
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 10/14/2005 12:00 am - 10/30/2005 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: 207,298 characters
Posted at December 5, 2005 12:14 PM
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