I Never Know What to Say to You

In studies posted on a blog/forum called the Daedalus Project, there are many types of statistics being studied and published about MMORPGs.  The main game that Daedalus project studied was World of Warcraft (WoW).  Daedalus’ studies are now on hold and they will no longer be posting studies on WoW until further notice.  They are however collecting data from realms in the North American/Oceanic and Hong Kong/Taiwan servers in preparation for further data analysis in the future.

Some of their research reflects the following:

• Population tends to be made of younger males (12-28) and older females (23-40)
• Players spend about half as much time researching game-related things as they do actually playing the game
• Considering the numbers of people surveyed, there were about 5 times many males as females–this may be just that females did not want to respond to the survey.
• There seems to be a wide variety of classes, races, and occupations in game, regardless of gender in game or out of game
• Most people found the game on their own or were referred by a friend, although as many females as were referred by a friend were referred by a romantic partner.
• There also seems to be a fairly steady rate of member increase, with exception of release date and release of major expansion packs
• Some members will create new characters when their main one gets to the level cap so that they can continue to progress

All of these factors should be studied so that game makers can view these statistics and make a better game altogether.  Also, these statistics are similar to some of the studies done on humans in real life such as gender, race, and income on a census sheet.  Many of these statistics can easily be found or computed by scraping data from servers.  Doing such a task is not difficult, time-consuming, or expensive–so why worry about it.

I find all of this information provided by the Daedalus Project to be very interesting, and also to be beneficial for those playing the game, so they may know the type of people they are ACTUALLY playing with as well as the general habits of those they play with.