PlayOn: Guilds Archives

July 14, 2006

Guild Membership and Stability Over Time

We then looked at how guild size and stability change over time. First, we looked at the percentage of characters who were in guilds. There was a mild positive increase over time.

This increase in percentage of guilded characters could mean one of two things. There may be more guilds that spring up, or characters are joining existing guilds. The following chart of average guild size suggests the latter is the case. Over time, established guilds attract more and more characters and increase in size.

Over time, guilds also stabilize. As the following chart shows, members are less likely to quit a guild as a server matures. Overall, these three charts suggest that over time, characters on a server are more and more likely to be in a guild. The guilds they join tend to be established guilds. And over time, guild turn-over decreases.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: July 2005 - January 2006
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character in each 2 week period.
Data Filter: Characters above level 1 and who spent less than 95% of their time in a main city.
Sample Size: ~100k characters in each 2 week period

Posted by Nick & Nic

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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 Nick & Eric

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March 03, 2006

Guild Churn

It's easy to talk about guilds as somewhat stable entities over a one month period, and by and large, most guilds with more than 10 members do survive from one month to the next. But we were interested in exploring the amount of guild member churn that occurs. For example, given the guilds with 30 members, how many characters were in that guild at some point during the month but are no longer in that guild?

To do this analysis, we tabulated two guild rosters:

Full Guild Roster: For each guild, note down all characters who have been observed to bear this guild tag at any point during the logging period.

Current Guild Roster: For each guild, note down only those characters who actually still bear this guild tag.

A character who is in the full guild roster but not the current guild roster is not simply a character who was not observed towards the end of the month. For this difference to occur, they must have deguilded (not bearing any guild tag) or joined another guild (bearing a new guild tag).

Thus for each guild, the difference between those two roster sizes is the member churn - the number of characters who were at one point in the guild but aren't there any longer. Below is the average churn for guilds of different sizes. The churn percentage was around 25% and was fairly stable across guilds of all sizes. In other words, if we see a guild that currently has 20 members, then over the past month, there were 5 members who have left the guild.

Posted by Nick & Eric

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January 04, 2006

Predicting Guild Survival

In an earlier post, we looked at the percentage of guilds that are not seen again after a one-month period. About 21% of guilds are not seen after a period of a month. Since then, we've focused a lot on creating metrics with which to compare guilds, including metrics that take into account the social network of each guild. This allowed us to address a question that we couldn't address before - How well can we predict a guild's survival rate?

To perform this analysis, we took the first and last 10 days of August and extracted all unique guilds in both samples. We only included a guild if its guild size was greater than one. We then calculated the following metrics for each guild:

Size: The number of unique characters seen to bear this guild tag over the 10 days.
Max Subgraph: The number of members in the largest subgraph. See this post for more information.

Mass Count: The number of subgraphs in a guild larger than 3. In other words, dyads are not counted.

Total Count: The number of subgraphs in a guild, including dyads.

Density: Connections between guild members can be mapped out as a matrix. The density of a guild is the percentage of cells that are filled in in that matrix.

Centrality: For each guild member, their degree centrality is the number of connections they have divided by the total number of connections they can have (i.e., the guild size - 1). The guild's centrality is the average of all of its character's centrality scores.

We then looked at the data from the last 10 days of August. If a guild seen in early August was not observed in late August, we marked it as "dead". Otherwise, we marked it as "survived". Using this method, we had 4,259 unique guilds in our sample. Of those, 924 (or 22%) were not seen at the end of August and marked as "dead".

We then ran a logistic regression with survival as the dependent variable and the metrics mentioned as the predictor variables. To make a long story short, Size and Mass Count were the only two substantial predictors. Both of those predictors were positively correlated with guild survival. Including the other predictors did not help our model significantly. The r-square for the model using these two predictors was .12.

We then went ahead and calculated the survival likelihood of guilds in our sample. Using a strict cut-off, the model that was provided by the logistic regression was accurate in 73% of the "death" cases and 69% of the "survival" cases. The model provided results that were better than chance alone, but not as strong as we would have liked. On the other hand, the exercise showed that simple metrics of individual guilds can be used to predict their long-term survival.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: First and last 10 days of August.
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: 4,259 guilds

Posted by Nick & Nic

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November 21, 2005

Guild Members: Predictors of Average Character Advancement in Guilds

We were interested in exploring what measurable features of a guild best predict the level advancement of its members. How might factors like guild size or max subgraph size relate to overall advancement of its members?

From the month of August, we calculated the following metrics for the first 10 days of the month and the last 10 days of the month:

Guild Size: The number of unique characters observed to bear the guild tag.

Max Subgraph Size: The size of the largest connected cluster of guild members. See this earlier article for details.

Subgraph (size > 3) Count: The number of subgraphs that had at least 3 members. In other words, all dyads are not counted.

Total Subgraph Count: The total number of subgraphs, including all dyads.

Density: For the matrix of guild members, the density is the number of cells filled out of all possible cells. In other words, how many of the guild's characters have been co-located during the sampling period?

For a measure of advancement, we used the following:

Standardized Character Advancement Score: A character's raw advancement is simply the number of levels the character has advanced. In this case, we subtracted the starting level from the ending level (end of month - beginning of month). The problem is that over a two week period, a 10 level advancement by a level 1 character is much less significant than a 10 level advancement by a level 50 character. In other words, the advancement needs to be qualified by the starting level somehow. The method we used to standardize character advancement was to calculate the average (and standard deviation) of advancement for every starting level. In other words, compared with other characters who also started at level 10, were you above, below, or right on the curve? Mathematically, we did this by calculating the z-score of advancement for every character. Characters who were already level 60 at the beginning of the sampling period were excluded. See this article for more details.

Standardized Guild Advancement Score: As a measure of guild performance and achievement, we averaged the standardized advancement scores of every member in that guild. This guild score was thus how much the guild as a whole advanced during the sampling period. Again, characters who were already level 60 at the beginning of the sampling period were excluded.

A multiple regression showed that the guild metrics from the first 10 days of the month were better predictors than guild metrics from the last 10 days of the month (r-squared = .18 vs. r-squared = .08).

Using only the guild metrics from the first 10 days of the month, we find that the size of the guild is negatively correlated with guild advancement. The bigger a guild is, the slower the members level. Intriguingly, the best positive predictor of guild advancement was not max subgraph size or density but the number of subgraphs with size greater than 3 (referred to in table below as masscount). And the total number of subgraphs was far weaker of a predictor. In other words, dyads don't help and it's really the number of subgraphs with 3 or more members in a guild that helps.

So the numbers are saying that how interconnected a guild is helps but it's got to be interconnected in the right way. The crucial thing seems to be having separate subgraphs that cater to different level bands within your guild that facilitate teaming and leveling throughout your guild. This seems like a reasonable explanation for what the masscount correlation is showing. Our analysis with guild metrics from different times of the month also show how dynamic this influence is. The guild metrics at the beginning of the month were better predictors than those at the end of the month.

The bottom-line seems to be that large guilds do not facilitate character advancement unless they are well-connected and have clusters of guild members for different level ranges.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 8/01/2005 12:00 am - 8/30/2005 12:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character. Each character was tracked across the server logs. Total playing time, lowest observed level, highest observed level, guild affiliation, and zones seen in were parsed.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 241,378 characters; 3,335 guilds

Posted by Nick & Nic

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October 31, 2005

Guilds: Densities

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 8/01/2005 12:00 am - 8/30/2005 12:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique guild. See also entry on how we derived these social network measures.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 5569 guilds

As another measure of guild cohesiveness, we implemented a measure of density - that is to say, given the matrix of all characters in a guild, how many of those cells are filled. For example, a percentage of 25% (using the co-presence metric) means that on average over the month of August, each guild member has been online at the same time with 25% of other guild members at least once. But this also means that on average, each character was never online at the same time as 75% of other guild members over the period of the month.

We ran our analyses for both the co-presence and the co-location metric. Furthermore, we analyzed the data either: 1) with all observed connections, 2) excluding connections with a weight of one (observed only once over a month - approximately 12 minutes), and 3) excluding connections with a weight less than 3 (observed only once or twice over a month - approximately 24 minutes).

There are several weaknesses we'd like to mention up front. First, alts of the same player who are in the same guild can by definition never be co-present or co-located. So presumably, this has an effect on our results as the guild size increases when alts are more frequent. Secondly, characters who switch guilds are counted on the rosters of both guilds for the analysis. So this too may artificially deflate our results.

Still, the overall guild densities were lower than we would have expected. The result indicates that in an average guild in WoW - the average guild has a mean size of 26 and a median size of 10 - over a period of a month, every guild member is co-present with only 30% of his/her guild. In other words, the average guild member is never co-present with 70% of his/her guild members over the period of one month. But if we choose a more conservative co-presence filter (only counting those members who have been co-present for more than 20 mins over the period of a month), the percentage drops by one-third. The average guild member in WoW, over a period of one month, is never online for more than 20 minutes at the same time as 80% of other members of his/her guild.

As a proxy for collaboration, the co-location metric lets us get a sense of how often guild members work together. The analysis shows that over a period of a month, the average guild member collaborates with 11% of his/her guild members for at least 10 minutes. In the table below, "Co-Loc > 1" means counting those members who were co-located for more than 1 time sample (~12 mins).

Here are the two tables for the guild densities analyzed by guild size.

We also calculated whether guild densities correlate with guild size. The co-presence metric does correlate around .21 - .25, but this measure must correlate with guild size - after all, the more dice you roll, the more likely that two will be the same number. The correlation with the co-location metric is more interesting. It does not significantly correlate with guild size. In other words, guild members in large and small guilds are just as likely to work with other members. This raw measure doesn't give a sense of true frequency though. However, this is congruent with our finding that members of large guilds do not spend more time together than members in smaller guilds. Although, again, this may simply be confounded with increase in alts in larger guilds who by definition can never be co-present or co-located.

Posted by Nick & Nic

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October 24, 2005

Guilds: Max Subgraph Size

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 8/01/2005 12:00 am - 8/30/2005 12:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique guild. See also entry on how we derived these social network measures.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 5569 guilds

A subgraph in a social network is a self-contained group of individuals who are interconnected. For example, in the example social network below (using the co-location metric), there are 5 subgraphs - 4 of which are dyads and 1 subgraph containing 6 members. The max subgraph in a social network is the subgraph with the most members. Thus, the max subgraph size in the example is 6.

The max subgraph size of each guild gives a rough sense of cohesiveness. If most members of a guild often do group and work together, they would have a large max subgraph size. In the example shown above, the low max subgraph size relative to the guild size (6 vs. 37) implies that the guild is fairly fragmented and not cohesive.

Unsurprisingly, larger guilds have larger max subgraph sizes. The correlation is r = .63.

But as a function of the guild size, the ratio itself is only weakly correlated with guild size, r = -.08. To a certain extent, this is partly due to the presence of alts who by definition cannot be co-located with the mains.

Plotting this out allows us to see more clearly that there is a steady rise in max subgraph size that essentially starts fluctuating past a guild size of 50. We could almost argue that maximum guild cohesiveness occurs at a guild size of around 50. After that point, it starts getting hard for a guild to remain cohesive.

Plotting this out by subgraph ratio (max subgraph size / guild size) shows a more dramatic trend. The subgraph ratio peaks at around 10 at .50 and drops steadily to below .10. The plot also shows that the correlation between guild size and subgraph ratio is strong only after a guild size of 10. Re-running the correlation after excluding guilds with less than 10 members, we find a correlation of -.36. Again, the larger the guild, the harder it is to remain cohesive.

Posted by Nick & Nic

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October 18, 2005

Guild Members: Time Spent Together

From the social network analyses, we had connection frequencies between any two members in all observed guilds. This data allowed us to explore the average amount of time any two members from the same guild are observed together (co-location metric) over a period of a month. In other words, how much time do guild members actually spend working with each other?

We looked at the data in two ways. In our first pass, we looked at the data for every member of the same guild. In other words, the question we were asking was - over a period of a month, what's the average amount of time any two members of the same guild spend together? We also analyzed this data for guilds of different sizes. Interestingly, the result was largely constant across guilds with more than 5 members - with a median between 6 and 9 minutes over a period of a month. The amount of time members in a guild spend together doesn't appear to change as a function of guild size (r = -.02).

We then redid the analysis but only included those dyads in each guild that did spend time together. In other words, the question we were asking was - over a period of a month, for those members of the same guild that spend time together, what is the average amount of time they spend together? Again, we see the same pattern, the result was largely consistent across different guild sizes - the median hovering around 80-87. The correlation between guild size and time spent together was again very weak (r = .04).

While the results seem low, remember that this is the average for all possible dyads within a guild. It's the average amount of time any 2 members of the same guild will spend together in a month. In a guild with 5 people, member A is thus expected to spend about 15 minutes each month with each of the other 4 members.

Posted by Nick & Nic

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October 07, 2005

Mapping Social Networks

We've been working on social network data at the guild level and would like to give an overview of our approach before getting into the gory details of what we've found. As many of you already know, there are only a few variables that we are able to get at from the client-side, so actual character interaction is something we must approximate via proxy metrics. We'd like to describe the metrics that we have used, but please do not hesitate to suggest others that would be possible with the set of variables the client-side currently has access to.

Guild Roster: Over the sampling period, we generated a list of all guilds we observed. Then we generated a roster for every guild consisting of every character who has been observed to have that guild tag.

Co-Presence Metric: In each snapshot, find all members of each guild that are online. For each observed pair, increment the connection weight between these two characters by 1. In other words, this metric tabulates overall guild co-presence - the frequency at which members of a guild are online at the same time.

Co-Location Metric: In each snapshot, find all members of each guild that are online and in the same zone (and only if the zone is not a main city zone). For each observed pair, increment the connection weight between these two characters by 1. In other words, this metric serves as a proxy for collaboration - the frequency at which members are working together at the same time.

We've found that the co-location metric provides more readable and comprehensible graphs and have used this metric for most of our analyses. Below, we present some social networks of guilds constructed using the co-location metric. We have removed the names of characters but left in their class and level information.

In the following social network graphs, connection weights are based on the co-location metric (with a minor threshold applied to exclude very weak ties). The weight of each line implies the collaboration frequency over the sampling period. Each node is marked by the character's class and level progression over the sampling period. The more connections a node has, the more central it is placed in the graph itself. Characters who were never co-located with others during the sampling period are depicted as free-floating nodes. All 4 guilds depicted had between 40-50 members. Therefore, the connection weights themselves are directly comparable between the guilds.

The social network in these 4 guilds are somewhat different. In the top-left example is a fairly low-level guild. Most of the members are in the mid 20's. It appears that most guild members do not play with each other. In the top-right example is a mostly high-level guild where most members do work together. It is easy to pick out the pairs that seem to work together the most (such as the mid-level druid and mage).

In the bottom-left example, we have a guild where we see more distinct cliques. There's a somewhat hard-core 4 character cluster on the left-hand side, a mid-level triad on the bottom left, a mid 20's clique that's held together by the druid in the middle, and finally a more casual low-level clique on the top right.

Posted by Nick & Nic

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October 03, 2005

Grouping and Guild Recruitment

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 8/07/2005 12:00 am - 8/14/2005 12:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character. Each character was tracked across the server logs. Total playing time, lowest observed level, highest observed level, guild affiliation, and zones seen in were parsed.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 148,846 characters

There was another aspect of guild recruitment that we were interested in exploring. We wondered whether most guild recruitment events could be attributed to grouping. In other words, do unguilded characters get recruited into guilds primarily because they group up with someone who is in a guild? Or do most guild recruitment events occur outside of a grouping situation?

To address this question, we built upon the guild recruitment location data:

Grouping Status During Guild Recruitment Event: For each guild recruitment location, check whether the character is in a group or not when they are observed to be in a new guild.

Here are the raw percentages for each zone type. Given that most guild recruitment occurs in main cities and outdoor zones, this implies that most characters are recruited into a guild when they are not grouped.

To get a more direct number, we took the guild recruitment location data and multiplied it by the percentage grouped data. Of all guild recruitment events, about 39% occur when a character is grouped, and 61% occur when a character is ungrouped.

Posted by Nick & Eric

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September 30, 2005

Guild Recruitment Location

We had competing hypotheses for where guild recruitment most often occurs. On the one hand, the amount of guild spamming in main cities made them a likely location. They are also centralized locations to begin with that would seem to encourage guild recruitment functions. On the other hand, characters spend more time in outdoor zones than in main city zones and grouping might encourage guild recruitment as well

To explore this question, we tabulated the location where characters joined a guild:

Guild Recruitment Location: If a character is not in a guild in snapshot X and is observed to be in a guild in snapshot X+1, then the character location at X+1 is noted down as the guild recruitment location and categorized as either being in 1) an instance, 2) a main city, 3) an outdoor zone, or 4) a PvP area (i.e., WSG or AV)

The resulting data let us look at 2 different things. First of all, it shows the distribution of guild recruitment events. Most guild recruitment occurs before level 10, drops sharply, and then spikes at level 60.

But the data also allows us to address our initial question. Across all levels, guild recruitment is most likely to occur in an outdoor zone followed by the main city zones. Interestingly, guild recruitment is more likely to occur in a main city zone as level increases. For example, city zone invites are almost comparable to outdoor zone invites at level 60, whereas outdoor zone invites are about 6 times higher than city zone invites at level 6.

Posted by Nick & Eric

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September 27, 2005

Switching Guilds

We wanted to get a sense of the pattern of migration from guilds to one another. Also, we were interested in how often people left guilds and whether this changed over the level spread. For each character, we calculated the following variables:

1) Unguild Event - for each time a character is observed in a guild in snapshot X but not observed to be in a guild in snapshot X+1, we increment their unguild event score by 1.
2) Guild Switch Event - for each time a character is observed in a guild in snapshot X and then observed in a different guild in snapshot X+1, we increment their guild switch event by 1.
3) Guilded - whether a character is guilded or not at the end of the sampling period. In other words, whether a character is guilded or not the last time we see them in a snapshot.

The results challenged some of our gut intuitions. For example, we would have guessed that guild switch events would be more common than unguild events. This is because with a sampling window of 12 minutes, almost all characters who had the intention of switching guilds would probably have done so during that window. We found the opposite, unguild events were far more frequent than guild switch events and this effect magnified over the level spread. Between levels 21-40, unguild events are 3 times more frequent than guild switch events (4% vs. 13%), and between levels 41-60, unguild events are 7 times more likely than guild switch events (3% vs. 21%). In other words, when characters leave a guild, it seems that they usually do not have a target guild they are intending to switch to. This leads us to believe that many characters become so frustrated or unsatisfied with a guild that they would rather leave and be alone.

The other interesting finding was seeing the familiar spikes. This time, they occur just before every 10th level, most noticeably the 39th and 49th. It's not clear to us though what it is about these levels (apart from their being close to big skill levels) that is causing the level of discontent with one's guild. Any guesses?

Posted by Nick & Eric

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August 18, 2005

Guild Abandonment

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High)
Sampling Period: Week 1: 6/10 - 6/17. Week 2: 07/05 - 07/12.
Sampling Resolution: ~14 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is a guild. We tracked all guilds observed in the June week and counted the number of unique characters observed to belong to each guild. We then did the same for all guilds observed in the July week. We then tabulated whether a guild observed in June was observed again in July.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 2,744 guilds.

Of the 2,744 guilds observed in the one-week period in June, 21% were not observed again in the one-week period in July. However, many of these guilds (19%) were only observed with one character in June. If we only take into account guilds with more than one observed character in June, then 13% of those were not observed again in July. If we increase that criteria to guilds with at least 5 characters, then 7% of those were not observed again in July.

Of the guilds that were observed in both June and July (N = 2168), the average change in guild size was exactly 0. In other words, on average, guilds did not grow or shrink over the one month period. This was somewhat surprising given that we might have expected guilds to grow over time. In fact, if we exclude all "one-person guilds", the average change is mildly negative (-.13). On the other hand, the range of change in guild size was quite large even though the overall change was near 0. The largest loss was 103 and the largest gain was 87.

Posted by Nick

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July 17, 2005

Guild Size

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High)
Sampling Period: 6/13/2005 9:00 am - 6/20/2005 9:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~14 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique guild. Each guild was tracked and every character with that guild tag was counted in the tabulation over the one week period.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 2,728 guilds

17.5% of characters were observed to be in a guild that no one else was observed to be in during the one week period - i.e., a one-person guild. The average guild size was 14.5 (16.8 if one-person guilds are excluded). The median was 6 (9 if one-person guilds are excluded). The largest observed guild had 257 members. The lower quartile is 2. The upper quartile is 16. The 90th percentile was 35. The 95th percentile was 54. The 99th percentile was 110.

The graphs below are presented as a complement to Christopher Allen's interesting article on Dunbar's number.

In this graph below, each guild is represented once and sorted in ascending order.

In this graph, the frequency of each guild size is shown.

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Guild Affiliation and Leveling Time

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High)
Sampling Period: 6/13/2005 9:00 am - 6/20/2005 9:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~14 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is leveling event. We tabulate the time between a character’s level and when we observe them at a new level. Only a character's online time is included. We exclude the first leveling event from every character because it doesn't constitute the total amount of time to make that level.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 81,887 leveling events

Do characters in guilds level faster or slower than characters not in guilds? Again, we won't be able to pinpoint the causality or take into account other variables, but it would be interesting to find out just how much difference there is in leveling times between characters in and not in a guild. Running an ANCOVA with Guilded (yes / no) as the independent variable and Leveling Time as the dependent variable, we found a significant, but small, effect where characters in a guild have a longer leveling time than characters not in a guild.

Between levels 1 and 20, the difference was 15 minutes (105 vs. 115 minutes). Between levels 21 to 40, the difference was 24 minutes (417 vs. 441 minutes). And then between levels 41 to 60, the difference was 72 minutes (802 vs. 874 minutes).

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July 01, 2005

Guild Affiliation and Group Ratio

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High)
Sampling Period: 6/13/2005 9:00 am - 6/20/2005 9:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~14 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character. Each character was tracked across the server logs. Total playing time, lowest observed level, highest observed level, guild affiliation, and zones seen in were parsed.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 76,364 characters

Even though characters in guilds do not play more than characters not in guilds, they do group more often and this effect becomes more pronounced over the levels. We wanted to check this in case being in a guild did not in fact provide a grouping advantage given the ease of finding an ad-hoc group. The following graph plots average percentage of time observed in a group with playing time controlled for.

In an ANCOVA with Guilded (yes / no) as the independent variable, average group ratio as the dependent variable, and Level (lowest observed level) and Playing Time (minutes observed over sampling period) as the covariates, the effect of Guilded was significant (p < .001) overall and for individual analyses within levels 1-20, 21-40, and 41-60.

Between levels 1 and 20, characters not in a guild are observed in a group on average 17% of the times compared with 20% for characters in a guild (note that these and the following group ratios are after playing time and level have been controlled for). Between levels 21 and 40, it is 26% and 31%. And between levels 41 and 60, it is 34% and 46%. In other words, between level 41-60, characters in a guild are in a group about 35% more often than characters not in a guild after playing time has been controlled for.

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June 13, 2005

How does being in a guild affect playing time?

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High)
Sampling Period: 6/2/2005 6:00 pm - 6/7/2005 3:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~16 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character. Each character was tracked across the server logs. Total playing time, lowest observed level, highest observed level, guild affiliation, and zones seen in were parsed.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 62,962 characters

An ANCOVA with Guild Involvement (Yes/No) as the independent variable, Playing Time as the dependent variable and Lowest Observed Level as the covariate did not reveal a significant effect (p = .32). In other words, controlling for level, being in a guild does not increase playing time. Of course, we also have to keep in mind that these are probably two different kinds of players to begin with so this analysis is not a pure comparison of guilded and non-guilded players.

Plotting playing time against level by guild involvement shows several interesting trends. Playing time increases dramatically for guilded players right before level 40. Because of the new skills and mount granted at level 40, it makes sense that players may increase their playing time to achieve those goals. Perhaps being in a guild facilitates this because other guild members encourage and help players reach level 40 when they get close to it, thereby increasing playing time.

Also, playing time is more stable after level 40 for guilded players and fluctuates more for players who are not guilded. Our thoughts are that being close to new skills (at odd levels) increases playing time while being far away from new skills (at even levels) decreases playing time. More importantly, this effect would be stronger for non-guilded players who have more control over their playing time and weaker for guilded players who are also playing for social obligations. Interestingly, this trend is more true before level 50 than after level 50. After level 50, non-guilded players play more at even levels and less at odd levels.

Posted by nickyee at 02:50 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

How does being in a guild affect playing time?

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Guild Involvement

Overall, 55% of characters are in a guild. If we exclude all level 1 characters, the overall average is 62%. As the graph below shows, about 90% of characters are in a guild after around level 43.

Posted by nickyee at 02:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack