PlayOn

Survey: How Do Players Create and Customize their Avatars?

nicolas — 2008-05-05T11:25:25-08:00

The PlayOn group is starting a research project on avatar personalization systems in multiplayer games, including World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Maple Story. As part of this research we would like to invite volunteers to participate in an online survey.

The purpose of this study is to explore how users of massively multiplayer online environments customize the appearance of their virtual body (avatar). During this survey, you will be asked to upload a screenshot of your avatar's appearance to our research website and to answer survey questions related to your gaming experience. The questionnaire should be fun to answer and we estimate it takes only 15 to 20 minutes to complete it.

If you'd like to help, please follow the links below depending on your game of choice:
- World of Warcraft: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=59117&lang=en]
- Maple Story: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=77654&lang=en]
- Second Life: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=35489&lang=en]

Note that you will be asked to provide an email address, where we will send you a unique participant code. Your email address will be kept strictly confidential and will be used only used to assign you a unique identifier; we will not sell or otherwise disclose it to any third party. Note also that we will never ask you to download software and/or enter your game account information at any time, we simply ask for a *picture* of your avatar. Due to the recent key-logging epidemic (esp. in WoW) players are understandably worried about clicking on links but you can rest assured we are only interested in research data.

We thank you in advance for your help and look forward to sharing the survey results with you!

PlayOn welcomes Don Wen

nicolas — 2008-02-08T11:48:30-08:00

As I am sure many of our readers noticed, PlayOn has been lying dormant for a while... but fear not, we plan to be much more active this year. Some of our new energy comes from the addition of Don Wen to our group. Don, originally from the Human Factors Laboratory at the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan, is visiting PARC for a year. His recent research has been focused on the design factors influencing a player's experience in MMOs, and the impact of these factors on things like fun and addiction. He will continue exploring these topics and others with our group.

Welcome Don!

Guild Name Generator

nickyee — 2007-08-21T01:10:12-08:00

In our analysis of guild names, we found that a basic grammar was able to parse about 90% of the names. This allowed us to create a guild name generator that used the grammar to create new guild names based on the weighted vocabulary of World of Warcraft guild names.

See full article for description of the guild name grammar we used.

PvP vs. PvE: Pressure to Level

nickyee — 2007-03-12T13:15:15-08:00

After looking at the data on general post-BC leveling patterns and speed, we wondered whether the post-60 distribution would differ between PvP and PvE servers. I suggested that it might be harder to level on a PvP server because of the general level of ganking and interference. Eric suggested that the potential for ganking would actually encourage PvP players to level as fast as possible - especially to stay ahead of the level curve. The data showed that Eric was right.

On both PvP and PvE servers, roughly 20% of the population was level 61 and above, but the distribution was significantly different. Players on PvP servers tended to be higher level than players on PvE servers. The graph below shows how clean that break is. The difference is especially clear for level 65 and above, and particularly for level 70.

Accumulated Leveling Times

nickyee — 2007-03-02T16:40:43-08:00

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.

Characters in BGs after Burning Crusade

nickyee — 2007-02-21T15:39:31-08:00

The Burning Crusade changed the WoW landscape a lot. One area that was significantly impacted was the number of unique characters in the old BGs (Alterac, Ararthi, Warsong, & Eye of The Storm). The end-game BGs which many level 60 characters spent time in were suddenly almost deserted and back at almost pre-cross-realm queue times. Now, it's intuitive that post-60 content is more appealing to many players than the same old BGs. What may be less obvious is the added pressure for those level 60 players to get the expansion pack. Level 60 players who were content to just PvP now have to endure much much longer wait times to get into BGs. In other words, level 60 life without the expansion pack became difficult. Anecdotally, it also soon became clear to the BG stragglers that the people stuck in those BGs were the ones who didn't have the expansion - yet. It's also interesting to point out this caused a large shift from a competitive orientation (in BGs) to a leveling/achievement orientation (in BC content) for many WoW players.

New Races Level Progression

nickyee — 2007-02-09T16:34:02-08:00

We tabulated the levels of all the characters of the two races for each day in January after the expansion roll-out. The following flash widget shows the average level progression by day for the Draenei and the Blood Elves across the 5 servers we monitor.

PLEASE NO OPEN CHAT IN THE GROUP

bobmoore — 2006-12-19T09:06:32-08:00

One of the nice features of most MMOs is their variety of broadcast chat channels. With them, you can send a text message to everyone in your guild, your current zone, or even your entire server. Such broadcast channels are an excellent means for meeting up with acquaintances or complete strangers and obtaining answers to specific questions. Even when you solo, you can still maintain a peripheral awareness of your social world by monitoring these broadcast channels, especially your guild chat.

Of course, the downside of broadcast channels is their misuse for "spam" (excessive or offensive messages). To discourage spam, fellow players tend to publicly rebuke the accused spammer and threaten to put him or her on "ignore." Social control is even easier within guild chat since members who repeatedly spam the guild can be easily kicked from it. But overall, broadcast chat channels, especially guild chat, tend to be used for good rather than evil. Take the following bit of banter which shows how guild chat can work well...

PvP Ranks Change (Basic)

nickyee — 2006-11-29T16:52:21-08:00

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.

PvP Ranks (by Race / Faction)

nickyee — 2006-11-12T17:38:26-08:00

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 social utility of jerks

cabell — 2006-11-02T17:13:00-08:00

The biggest draw for MMOGs is obviously the MM part. Players enjoy participating in a persistent, multi-user world; if they didn't, they wouldn't pay subscriptions to do so when there are plenty of single-player video games available. Ironically, however, the same fellow users who make MMOGs so appealing can also be one of their biggest headaches. Unwelcome behaviors range from trash talk and verbal harassment to hardcore griefing like camping in order to kill newbies over and over again. Most companies will institute sanctions such as account suspensions against egregious offenders, but a lot of behavior, such as inequitable loot sharing and excessive aggro that gets everybody killed, falls into a grey area of "jerky, but probably not actionable."

PvP Ranks (by Class)

nickyee — 2006-10-31T13:40:53-08:00

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.

PvP Ranks (by Hours Played)

nickyee — 2006-10-23T13:35:52-08:00

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.

PvP Ranks (Basic)

nickyee — 2006-10-23T13:28:53-08:00

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.

On the internet everyone knows you're not actually an elf.

cabell — 2006-09-13T14:02:14-08:00

Lisa Nakamura has written extensively about race and identity tourism in virtual environments. She argues that in most cyber social spaces, the surface absence of race is an implicit assumption of default whiteness. The textual environment LambdaMOO, for instance, requires users to set a character gender (although "neuter" is available); although players may choose to include it in their character description, race "is not even on the menu" as far as the interface is concerned (Nakamura 1999). Today's MMOGs, however, make race explicit insofar as one cannot create a "colorless" virtual avatar--although most games offer some non-human options ranging from elves to cow, rat, and lizard people. As something that is visually available to all players and generally considered integral to personal identity in the mainstream culture, race, whether human or fantasy, seems to offer a particularly valuable resource for role-playing (RP) in game spaces.

Despite the possibility of non-white human avatars, however, their actuality seems rare. A Black character with an afro in City of Heroes draws comment from other players when a white character with spiky pink hair does not. A preliminary analysis of video data from several games yields several examples of players using non-human race as an RP resource, but only one instance in which a character roleplays non-white human race. In this latter instance, uptake from other characters is problematic, an issue that may be related to the character's heavy reliance on racial stereotypes. Non-white avatar options such as hairstyles are also in limited supply in most games, limiting available "looks" for such characters.