World Of Warcraft: PARC PlayOn Blog Data

Every day, millions of players interact with each other in MMOs. Imagine the gold-mine of social data that is accumulating on the server-side. It's a pity that it's so hard to get access to that data. This is changing though with games like World of Warcraft that allow third-party census mods.

Several researchers at PARC have devised an automated system that cycles through 3 servers for both Alliance and Horde and performs a census every 15 minutes. This longitudinal data provides a way to answer interesting questions about online social behavior. For example:

- Does guild size vary across server types?

- Do players in guilds spend more time in the game than those not in guilds?

- What percentage of players are grouped at any given moment?

For the answers to these questions and more, come visit us at the new PlayOn Blog: http://blogs.parc.com/playon/

Source: MMORPG.com