PlayOn: PvP Rank Archives

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 by nickyee at 04:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 12, 2006

PvP Ranks (by Race / Faction)

We also looked at PvP ranks by race and faction. Both analyses showed a similar pattern; Horde characters are on average a higher PvP rank than Alliance characters. For example, the graph below plots out the distribution of PvP rank by the two factions. Alliance has more low-ranked characters (Rank 3 and below), while Horde has more high-ranked characters (Rank 4 and above).

The same pattern emerged from the analysis by race. The four Horde races are higher ranked than the four Alliance races – small differences that nonetheless provide a striking division.

There are several reasons for why we might be seeing this pattern:

1) Practice: The Alliance-Horde imbalance (2:1 in our sample) makes it easier for Horde characters to enter PvP BGs. This means that given the same amount of play-time, Horde has less wait time, and thus more practice. This might also encourage forming groups ahead of time (i.e. prefabs) because it doesn't impact wait times, whereas it would in the Alliance case.

2) Motivation: Players who choose to play Horde are more achievement-minded and competitive than players who choose to play Alliance. Thus, one reason why Horde out-performs Alliance is because players on Horde-side are more psychologically matched for PvP-type encounters.

3) Class: Some players also believe that Shamans are disproportionately suited to PvP compared with Paladins. This may give the Horde side an edge. We will explore this in more detail in another post focusing on class differences in PvP ranks.

4) Sampling Bias: It is also possible that what we're seeing is simply due to some unknown sampling bias. For example, Ogrimmar may be more of a hub than Ironforge is (e.g., there is more spillover to Stormwind on Alliance than there is spillover to Undercity on Horde).

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: One Week in October 2006
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique character in each hour of the day.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 128,477 characters

Posted by nickyee at 05:38 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 31, 2006

PvP Ranks (by Class)

And finally, we also looked at the differences in PvP rank by class. Like the differences of PvP rank by race, the differences were quite small. Shamans had on average the highest rank, while Priests had on average the lowest rank.

It was interesting that 3 of the healing classes (Priests, Druids, Paladins) were on the bottom of the list, while the final healing class (Shamans) were on the top of the list. Part of the reason why may be that the Shaman attracts more competitive-minded players.

Posted by nickyee at 01:40 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

October 23, 2006

PvP Ranks (by Hours Played)

In the same way that we could approximate the number of hours played it is necessary to get from one level to the next, we could also approximate how many hours of play per week it takes to advance from one PvP rank to the next. We tabulated the average number of hours played for characters in each PvP rank. Of course, the numbers derived do not correspond directly to the time it takes to reach the next PvP rank, but they are indicative of the time invested as players are at higher and higher PvP ranks. The following is the graph we got from that analysis.

Data from The Daedalus Project suggests that the average MMO player spends about 20 hours a week in the game. This implies that the average player "hit a ceiling" around Rank 5 (Sergeant Major / First Sergeant). They will find it hard to get beyond Rank 5 unless they put more time into the game than they are used to. It takes about 40 hours (or double the average) of play each week to reach Rank 11 (Commander / Lieutenant General) . More tellingly, it takes about 4 times the average play-time (or almost 80 hours) for a player to reach Rank 14 (Grand Marshal / High Warlord). That is more than 10 hours a day of game-play.

Posted by nickyee at 01:35 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

PvP Ranks (Basic)

Eric had recently included a PvP rank scraper into the census script. Because PvP rank is not one of the variables that is returned via the /who list, this data was collected using the method used to scrape character gender. We gathered PvP rank data by moving collection characters to the faction capitals (Ogrimmar & Ironforge). As the character census occurs, the collection character tries to target each character seen in the census. If they happen to be nearby, we note down their census rank. As discussed in the character gender thread, this method has several biases. We're more likely to find the PvP ranks of players who: 1) play a lot, and 2) spend a lot of time in the main cities. On the other hand, given the way that PvP is currently structured (via queues originating in the main cities), the sampling bias may dovetail with the practice of PvP.

We began analyzing the data by trying to get a sense of how well or how poorly the scraper managed to get the PvP rank for all characters on the server. We choose a one week time-frame. Because PvP ranks are updated once each week on Tuesday, we choose a Tuesday to Monday period to analyze.

Overall, the scraper got 50% of the PvP ranks of all characters on the 5 servers. But this percentage is actually deceptive because PvP ranking doesn't begin till the upper levels. The following graph shows the average character level by PvP rank of the character. If we only look at characters above level 45, the scraper found 72% of their PvP ranks.

The distribution of PvP ranks looks like this:

While the scraper did not find the PvP ranks of all characters, there is probably enough to explore the data a little and get a sense of underlying differences.

Posted by nickyee at 01:28 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack