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April 07, 2006

The Dreaded Level 60 Scraper Cap

When Eric and Nic first implemented the WoW census scraper early last year, one potential problem they foresaw was the 49 character limit to the return from the /who command. Because the scraper polled each race, class, and level combination separately, this limitation meant that there would be a growing problem with characters who are not scraped because there are more than 49 characters in that category during peak hours (i.e., level 60 Night-Elf Rogues).

As the WoW servers have matured, this issue has become more and more potentially problematic in terms of data quality and analytic validity. And this is an issue that many comments here at the blog have touched upon. To this end, we sought to estimate the percentage of characters that were not being scraped due to this cap. This would give us an idea of how bad the problem was.

To do this, we grabbed one Saturday from every month from a high population server from our logs (from July 2005 to January 2006). Since this was a high population server, we took this to be our worst case scenario. We then parsed the number of level 60s logged per race per class combination (during each snapshot) - thus 20 combinations for Horde and 20 combinations for Alliance.

One problem was that Blizzard started to have authentication problems after November of 2005, and this interefered with our census scrapers logging on during peak hours. To avoid analyzing data after this period, we chose the regular November 2005 data for this analysis.

Next, we scrolled through these parsed logs to find the snapshot with the most number of overloads on that November Saturday. We then proceeded to estimate the number of overloads in that snapshot (the worst case scenario). To estimate the number of characters that we were missing from that overload, we looked at the observed number of characters in a non-overloaded race/class combination and then referring to the overall ratio of race/class combinations (on WarcraftRealms census), we inferred how many characters there should be in the overloaded combinations. We did this separately for the Alliance and the Horde and then calculated the % missing due to overload.

For the Horde, at worst peak time in November, we missed 3% of level 60s. For the Alliance, at worst peak time in November, we missed 13% of level 60s.

So overall, even in the worst case scenario on a high population server in November 2005, we were only missing 13% of level 60s. For most of the day, no race/class combinations were overloaded.

Posted by nickyee at 12:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 03, 2006

Guild Churn by Server Type

We then looked at whether guild member churn was different across the server types. The data showed that member churn was significantly and consistently higher on PvP servers than RP or PvE servers. The member churn rate on PvP servers is about 75% to 100% higher than that on RP or PvE servers.

Off the top of our heads, we had no explanation for this dramatic difference. It was clear that characters were more likely to leave and switch guilds on a PvP server, but it's not clear whether this is because of the PvP setting or because players who join PvP servers are apriori different from those that join RP or PvE servers.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of January
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: 5,285 guilds

Posted by nickyee at 12:31 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack