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January 20, 2006

Raph Koster at PARC

PlayOn is happy to host Raph Koster of Sony Online Entertainment on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at PARC. Raph will give a PARC Forum titled, "The Medium That Ate The World," in which he will unravel the mysteries of games, cyberspace and the human condition (all in a little under an hour).

The PARC Forum is open to the public so if you're in the SF Bay Area please drop by!

Posted by Bob

Posted by bobmoore at 02:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

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 by nickyee at 02:01 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006

Predicting Guild Survival

In an earlier post, we looked at the percentage of guilds that are not seen again after a one-month period. About 21% of guilds are not seen after a period of a month. Since then, we've focused a lot on creating metrics with which to compare guilds, including metrics that take into account the social network of each guild. This allowed us to address a question that we couldn't address before - How well can we predict a guild's survival rate?

To perform this analysis, we took the first and last 10 days of August and extracted all unique guilds in both samples. We only included a guild if its guild size was greater than one. We then calculated the following metrics for each guild:

Size: The number of unique characters seen to bear this guild tag over the 10 days.

Max Subgraph: The number of members in the largest subgraph. See this post for more information.

Mass Count: The number of subgraphs in a guild larger than 3. In other words, dyads are not counted.

Total Count: The number of subgraphs in a guild, including dyads.

Density: Connections between guild members can be mapped out as a matrix. The density of a guild is the percentage of cells that are filled in in that matrix.

Centrality: For each guild member, their degree centrality is the number of connections they have divided by the total number of connections they can have (i.e., the guild size - 1). The guild's centrality is the average of all of its character's centrality scores.

We then looked at the data from the last 10 days of August. If a guild seen in early August was not observed in late August, we marked it as "dead". Otherwise, we marked it as "survived". Using this method, we had 4,259 unique guilds in our sample. Of those, 924 (or 22%) were not seen at the end of August and marked as "dead".

We then ran a logistic regression with survival as the dependent variable and the metrics mentioned as the predictor variables. To make a long story short, Size and Mass Count were the only two substantial predictors. Both of those predictors were positively correlated with guild survival. Including the other predictors did not help our model significantly. The r-square for the model using these two predictors was .12.

We then went ahead and calculated the survival likelihood of guilds in our sample. Using a strict cut-off, the model that was provided by the logistic regression was accurate in 73% of the "death" cases and 69% of the "survival" cases. The model provided results that were better than chance alone, but not as strong as we would have liked. On the other hand, the exercise showed that simple metrics of individual guilds can be used to predict their long-term survival.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: First and last 10 days of August.
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique guild with a guild size greater than 1.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 4,259 guilds

Posted by nickyee at 05:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack