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March 02, 2007
Accumulated Leveling Times
The timing of the expansion gave us a very interesting opportunity to estimate leveling times. In the past, we could estimate each individual leveling event, but it was impossible to know the accumulated leveling time of a character if the character was created before we started capturing snapshots. But even if we only included characters created after the snapshots began, we would have to aggregate across different months to get a sizeable pool of characters, and that introduced potential time event confounds (i.e., a certain class was balanced).
What the expansion did was it encouraged many players to start a new character at the same time - specifically with the Draenei and the Blood Elves. We know that all Draenei and Blood Elves were created after January 17th, and there are many of these characters. This allowed us to use a large sample of actually accumulated leveling times to estimate the overall curve.
We started by calculating the average accumulated playing times of Draenei and Blood Elves for each level. The blips in the graph (especially post-50) are due to low samples and potential breaks in the data collection process. However, the graph did hint at an underlying curve.
A curve estimation algorithm showed that the power curve best fit the raw data. The resulting r-squared was .98. In other words, the estimated curve captured about 98% of the variance in the raw data.
Below, we plot out the smoothed curve that was generated. The data suggests that it will take a player on average 15 full days of accumulated playing time to reach level 70, and that the 10-day mark is crossed at approximately level 56.
Our much earlier estimated that it took about 15 full days to reach level 60. This suggests that characters have leveled quicker over time, possibly due to extensive twinking, familiarity with quests and instances, or a well-stocked economy.
One potential bias in this data is that all the high level Draenei and Blood Elves (particularly those who are level 60 and above) are probably more hard-core than the average WoW player. Thus, the high-end of the data might not reflect the average player. One counterargument is that the curve doesn't seem to break. In other words, the accumulated time of level 70 characters does fall in the correct range as would be predicted even if we looked at levels 1-50 alone. This suggests that those high level Draenei and Blood Elves didn't level "quicker" as much as that they spent much more hours playing in the month that the expansion was out. In either case, we would be able to sample the data again once more Draenei and Blood Elves are past level 60 and see whether the curve changes.
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: January 17th 2007 - February 17th 2007
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique Draenei and Blood Elf
Sample Size: 42,922 Blood Elves and 35,939 Draenei
Posted at March 2, 2007 04:40 PM
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Comments
Interesting post! The claim that it takes 15 days to get to level 70 seems about right. But see this thread (url below) in which a poster claims to level his shadow priest to level 47 in 80 hours (ie 3.3 days).
Posted by: Rob at August 2, 2007 04:23 PM
A more interesting statistic would be the average playing time of an individual. This chart lets us understand total amount of time, but not the time frame in which it was used.
It would be interesting to see how many hours the average player is spending in the game per day. I've not seen any solid data, sense the release of WoW, that covers this.
If it is shown that people are playing 5 hours a day 5 hours a week or more, then the social implications of this wouldn't be good for a player with a job, school, or a social life. It would require that a person neglect these things to be competitive.
Anyway, I wonder if players do this 15 day spree within the course of 2-3 months, or over the course of 6-12 months. The impact of play time in both situations could create massive negative impact on these individuals real lives.
Posted by: J at November 19, 2007 03:43 PM