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June 30, 2006

Naming Patterns in Fantasy Races

We were interested in the names that people picked for their characters. Were there commonalities across the WoW races or did different races have their own naming conventions? So we parsed through all unique names in the January data in several ways - by first letter, by 3-letter prefix, and 3-letter suffix. Here are the top 10 lists for these different parses by race.

There were interesting findings throughout. The most common first letter of a name was "S". 10% of all names in the sample began with an "S". This was followed by "A" (7.6%) and "D" (6.7%). If anyone has access to the distribution of first letters of English names, please let us know how this matches to those.

Among the prefixes, it was interesting to see the prefix "Sha" appear in the top ten for all the races. It was also interesting to see racial differences. For example, we see references to "Moon", "Night" and "Star" among the Night Elf names, whereas we find references to "Dead/Death", "Mort" and "Malevolence" in the Undead names.

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 character.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 179,003 characters

Posted by nickyee at 02:33 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

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 by at 09:59 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack