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November 29, 2006
PvP Ranks Change (Basic)
After looking at PvP ranks in one week of time, we decided to explore the changes in PvP rank over time. For this, we took two consecutive one-week periods to calculate the PvP rank change. We start here by providing a sense for how much of the player base we were able to capture.
Of the 128,354 characters, we had PvP rank information for both weeks for 41,997 characters. This turns out to be about 57% of all characters above level 45 (i.e., the average level of Rank 1 characters). While this is only about half of all possible characters, it is large enough of a sample to explore some of the underlying differences.
We found that most characters (80%) do not change rank over a one week period. About 5.5% lost rank and 13.5% gained rank. As the graph below shows, most of the changes occur in the +/- 1 range. Characters who gained more than 2 ranks were all unranked the week before.
Below is a graph that shows the average rank change for characters in each of the 14 ranks. The plot shows that from Rank 1 to Rank 7 that most players tend to gain rank from week to week, but that it is difficult to hold on to your rank once you get to Rank 11 and above. In those ranks, there is an average downward trend. In particular, most characters who were at Rank 14 (the highest rank) give it up as soon as they reach the highest rank. This is consistent with anecdotal data from the WoW forums. After all, once the Grand Marshal equipment has been acquired, there is little incentive to maintain Rank 14.
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Two consecutive one-week periods in October, both starting on Tuesday at 10am pacific time (i.e., after ranks have been calculated for that week).
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character in each hour of the day.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 128,354 characters
Posted at November 29, 2006 04:52 PM
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Comments
Interesting. I wonder if this graph is affected at all by the anticipation of the upcoming tabula rasa patch?
Posted by: Chef at November 29, 2006 10:37 PM
In fact there's strong social pressure to step down as soon as you make rank 14, since there can only be one at a time. (often teams that grind pvp together rotate their members through the top rank in an agreed-upon order.)
Posted by: mjh at December 1, 2006 01:50 PM