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December 26, 2005
Restarts
Since I first began parsing the census data, I've always noticed that some people made negative progress over the sampling period. In other words, their ending level was lower than their starting level. The only way to do this is to have restarted a character using the same name. I never thought much about this, and always assumed that these were separate players who simply used the same names, and thus I always filtered these characters out (always around 0.3%).
Recently, Nic brought this issue up at our weekly meeting and we finally got around to talking about it. And as we talked about what was driving this phenomenon, it became clear that it probably wasn't the case that we were looking at two different players. Nic and Eric had also noticed this when they first started looking at the data (before I arrived this summer) and they suggested that these were players who decided to recreate a character using that name because they liked that name. And then I realized that there is no reason why someone would delete their character given that even when players quit they might want to come back at a later date. So we all started to realize that the majority of these characters with negative progress are probably made by the same player rather than two different players.
Altogether, we found 567 restarts in our sample. That came out to 0.3% of all characters we parsed. Plotting out the frequencies of characters that have been restarted is quite interesting. There were quite a few high level characters that were restarted.
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 by nickyee at 08:00 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
December 20, 2005
Character Gender and Server Type
As you can guess, it makes me really happy when survey data from The Daedalus Project matches census data here at PlayOn. The gender differences by server type is one of these matches. The survey data showed that players on PvP servers tend to be younger and more likely to be men. And because younger men tend to gender-bend less than older men (the most likely demographic to gender-bend), we would expect that overall that there are fewer female avatars on PvP servers than PvE servers. The census data showed this pattern.
The percentage of female avatars was highest in RP servers and lowest in PvP server.
If we actually calculate the precise gender ratio for the servers, we get a clearer graph. The graph below plots out the number of female avatars per male avatar. On the RP server, it's about 1:2. On the PvP server, it's 1:3.5
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
Collection Method: Please see our earlier post to get a sense for how we collected the data on gender.
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: 90,961 characters with known gender
Posted by nickyee at 03:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 12, 2005
Gender, Race, and Class
It's a little eerie how those 3 words have their own meanings in an MMO, but yet when you put them all together, you realize how much weight they carry over from the physical world. And it makes you wonder whether it's really possible to talk about fantasy race without it somehow always implicating race in the physical world. (Ah - but that discussion is for another blog)
Here's what we found in our data. The gender ratio is different for the Alliance and the Horde. There are fewer female characters on the Horde side. One out of three characters is female on the Alliance side. On the Horde side, it is one out of five. Our intuition is that fewer players choose to be female on Horde side because the female Horde characters are kinda ... ugly.
A more fine-grained analysis shows the underlying difference. The top 3 races with the most female avatars are Alliance races - Night Elves, Humans, and Gnomes.
The Daedalus Project data suggests that male and female players are equally represented on both the Alliance and Horde. This implies the observed gender differences are driven almost entirely by gender-bending. Given that players who choose Horde are more likely to be competitive and achievement-oriented than players who choose Alliance who tend to be more customization and role-playing oriented, this makes a great deal of sense. Of course, as many players point out, they gender-bend to have an attractive avatar to look at. Playing a female Horde character would defeat this purpose.
And we finish up with the gender differences by class.
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
Collection Method: Please see our earlier post to get a sense for how we collected the data on gender.
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: 90,961 characters with known gender
Posted by nickyee at 12:20 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
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 by nickyee at 12:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack