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January 13, 2006
Centrality and Class
Centrality is a measure of how well-connected an individual is in a social network. We created three measures of centrality in our exploration of whether a character's centrality in a guild was related to the character's class. In our analysis, we only included characters that were in a guild in the month of November.
Crude Degrees: The number of connections a character has.Degree Centrality: Crude Degrees divided by the total number of possible connections - i.e., the guild size - 1.
Combined Weights: Connections between characters are actually the total time those two characters have spent together. The above two measures count any connection weight greater than zero as a connection. In this metric, we add up all the weights a character has. This represents the total time this character has spent with other members of their guild.
We then plotted these scores by character class.* The results across all three metrics were almost identical. Priests were always best connected. Paladins, Rogues, and Hunters were always least connected. In terms of pure connections, Priests that are in a guild have on average 12 more connections than Paladins who are in guilds. Priests that are in guilds spend about double the time with guild mates that Paladins do.
While it may be tempting to explain all of this by class demand driven by game mechanics, what we can't tease out from this analysis of course is the personality differences involved in choosing a character class. After all, players who choose to be Priests may simply be more gregarious than those who choose to be Paladins and that in and of itself may be accounting for a great deal of the variance.
So I went back and checked the numbers at The Daedalus Project. Players who prefer Priests and Paladins score high on Socializing, so it doesn't look like the desire to Socialize is driving this difference. The Teamwork score almost looks like a better fit. So there's some evidence that part of what we're seeing here is an expression of player motivations in addition to impacts of class demand.
*Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of November
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: None
Sample Size: 179,003 characters
Posted at January 13, 2006 02:01 PM
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Comments
please define how you determine a "connection."
Posted by: alex at January 14, 2006 10:42 AM
Alex, Mapping Social Networks (http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2005/10/mapping_social.html) would have a little more info.
"Co-Presence Metric: In each snapshot, find all members of each guild that are online. For each observed pair, increment the connection weight between these two characters by 1. In other words, this metric tabulates overall guild co-presence - the frequency at which members of a guild are online at the same time.
"Co-Location Metric: In each snapshot, find all members of each guild that are online and in the same zone (and only if the zone is not a main city zone). For each observed pair, increment the connection weight between these two characters by 1. In other words, this metric serves as a proxy for collaboration - the frequency at which members are working together at the same time."
Although I believe that we modified the co-location metric to only exist when both characters were in some group. (Of course, we can't really know if they were in the same group.)
Posted by: Eric Nickell at January 14, 2006 06:44 PM
Interesting article.
It may be worth noting that Priests exist as class choices for both Horde and Alliance. The Horde equivalent of the Paladin, the Shaman, scores much higher on the grouping scales. I think that there are three things that contribute to this:
1) general disdain for paladins by anyone who doesn't play a paladin, (i exaggerate a little)
2) Shaman are extremely valuable as tank/dps/heal variants, and are assets to any party,
3) Priests usually NEED to be grouped in order to complete many quests or survive in Contested areas.
As a priest myself, I find that it is vital to develop and maintain relationships within and even outside the guild to complete various high-level quests, as well to ensure my own survival.
Posted by: Matt at January 17, 2006 09:44 AM
Very interesting. Of course, there are many factors that may also influence the situation observed.
For example, level might be a factor to take into consideration, too. Many paladins complain about their limited role as cleanse/buff bots in high-end instances.
Another thing that might explain the paladin's and hunter's lesser interaction with guild mates is their soloing capacity. This is the counterpoint to Matt's comment third point - hunters and paladins can solo most quests without help, or with random PUGs. I can't speak about rogues as I have never played one, but the explanation could be the same.
All in al, though, excelent food for thougth.
Posted by: Nea at January 17, 2006 10:28 AM
I would agree with all of that. Limited end-game use and soloing ability.
Rogues, as demonstrated in an earlier article, are the favorite of "farmers" or "professionals". This would lead me to believe that they are excellent solo artists as well. In my experience as a rogue, I would tend to believe that for two reasons -- stunlock spec rogues can kill a mob without taking any damage (when they do it right), and they can also spend a good deal of time solo-stealthing through instances to get to final bosses.
Posted by: Matt at January 17, 2006 01:44 PM
As someone whose mains are a hunter and a paladin, I can tell you very clearly why his chart is the case, at least on that end of the spectrum. Both classes are extremely solo-friendly, self-sufficient, sustanable-DPS, low-downtime classes.
Yes, a Holy spec paladin is a group whore, and a Shadow spec priest can solo the world. However, these are probably not the norm. Most people play priests to group, and I imagine most people play paladins to solo the world. This idea stems from well before WoW: a paladin in hell...
Posted by: hikaru at January 31, 2006 10:22 AM
I don't get the sense that this data is weighted according to availability of a given class -- eg, are priests, individually, the most connected because, collectively, they're the rarest class in a guild?
Can we see this data where, for each guild, each class's score is divided by the number of members of that class in the guild?
Posted by: Byron Ellacott at February 15, 2006 03:03 PM
I don't get the sense that this data is weighted according to availability of a given class -- eg, are priests, individually, the most connected because, collectively, they're the rarest class in a guild?
Can we see this data where, for each guild, each class's score is divided by the number of members of that class in the guild?
(Sorry if this turns out to be a double post)
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