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June 21, 2006
City Migration
Edward Castronova has posted an article on Terranova about viewing synthetic worlds as petri dishes in which social experiments are being conducted.
"WoW used to have Auction Houses only in one city per side. Focusing on Alliance (Horde sucks and is evil, as everyone knows, so I will ignore it), the city was Ironforge. Then WoW opened up Stormwind and Darnassus for auctions as well. The prediction would be that if coordination effects are strong, one city would be used. If Ironforge remained as the main market, that would be inconclusive - maybe it is just history. But if it remained one city, but not Ironforge, that would confirm the power of coordination."
We have the data, so why not look at it?
This data is only for one of the servers we track, a PvP server, and only looking at the alliance side.
WoW patch 1.9 was released 1/3/06, and created auction houses in Darnassus and Stormwind, as well as the pre-existing one in Ironforge. For each census we have, I computed the percentage of players in each capitol city, out of all players seen in a capitol city that census.
It's interesting that there is both an obvious change immediately after auction houses become available in Stormwind and Darnassus, but that the change is continuing for some time, possibly some sort of exponential decay. Unfortunately we're missing quite a bit of data for February.
Btw, if you would like to examine the data from which the graph was made, download the csv file, and open it in your favorite spreadsheet.
Posted at June 21, 2006 09:59 AM
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Comments
It's really more a case of convenience. Darnassus is rarely used because the city itself is off in a distant corner of the globe, and more importantly the mail box and bank are a long way away from the auction house. Ironforge and Stormwind are just as good as each other, but I use Ironforge more because it's more centrally located in the world, and so usually happens to be closer.
Posted by: Joel at June 25, 2006 06:05 PM
My Alliance characters generally do their administrative stuff in Stormwind now. It takes a bit longer getting places but it's a little less crowded and the dragonslayer buff is nice to get.
Posted by: Unity at July 3, 2006 12:13 AM
Who would wipe their ass with the allys? The olny thing they know how to do is use their credit cards to power level and buy gold. The horde sucks and is eveil huh? Well I read the WoW story one day when the servers were down and turns out, Night Elfs came from Trolls. Oh and the Orcs were the good guys, they tried to fight off the waves of demons that a night elf was the commander of. So go drowned your self allys, I'll be camping you.
Voodoohex
Dentarg
Posted by: Taylor at September 29, 2006 10:01 PM