New Daedalus project!

 Posted by (Visited 5157 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 102008
 

The Daedalus Project.

Lots of stuff to dig into, but here’s some highlights:

  • 23% of users create their own guild
  • 20% join because a real life friend invited them
  • Only 4% come via random invite
  • 26% have been in guilds for longer than 2 years
  • 59% join guilds where they know someone in RL
  • Women were twice as likely to be in guilds with romantic partners
  • 20% of people pick a class and always go for it in game after game
  • 17% go for class abilities instead (hardest, crowd control, overpowered, etc)
  • 11% go for the aesthetic of a player race
  • 67% have a preferred class type.
  • On average players have 8.7 characters on their account, but most everyone can identify a “main”
  • Genre: Both genders like fantasy best, but men also like futuristic spaceships a lot.
  • More people like being a vampire than a vampire hunter, but women are more into being a vampire than men are.
  • 80% of people would rather be in the least popular faction.

  9 Responses to “New Daedalus project!”

  1. “80% of people would rather be in the least popular faction.”
    -There’s a thesis in that line right there.

    (Although I might add “But they also think that factions not balanced and the more popular ones are :P.”)

  2. What is a “popular faction”? Are popular factions the largest, the most well-known, or the what?

  3. @DM: yeah, “I’d rather be in the least popular faction, but it sucks so I switched to the most popular one…”

  4. “but women are more into being a vampire than men are. “

    There is a really horrible, nasty joke in there if you look for it. Something along the lines of… never mind.

  5. I have to question the validity of statements like:

    “Genre: Both genders like fantasy best, but men also like futuristic spaceships a lot.”

    It’s not very surprising to find that gamers who predominantly play fantasy games (because let’s face it, there aren’t exactly all that many non-fantasy options) like fantasy more.

    And while I really respect what Nick Yee is doing, and the surveys have always been really interesting, I have a very hard time finding them even remotely scientific. The sample is about as far from random and representative as you can get, as it’s opt-in and self-selecting. The results tell us more about the audience that visits the site than it does anything else.

  6. @Eolirin,

    There is no perfect methodology. Never has been, never will be. A properly scientific sociological survey-driven study almost certainly breaches ethical concerns.

  7. To build on what Michael said: What is feasible is oftentimes not optimal in research, especially with dynamic communities like online games. However, whenever more reliable data has been found (such as marketing reports from game companies, server-side data like in PARC’s PlayOn project, or a randomly sampled survey from a collaboration with Sony Online), that data has closely matched what I’ve found in my surveys. These multiple data sources help us approximate what is really happening even though each source has its own limitations.

  8. @Nick, multiple data sources *do* help, yeah. I’m just still not sure that even SOE’s stuff is sufficiently representative of the playerbase in general. If it does continue to hold, that’s great, but you will forgive the skepticism in the meantime?

  9. Oh, and @Michael, just because there’s no perfect methodology doesn’t mean that all methodologies are equal. You really do need to strive toward as representative and random a sample as possible, and while the limitations on resources that Nick’s got to deal with are understandable, and he’s doing the best he can under them, it’s hard to accept the surveys as either due to the way the whole thing’s set up.

    Again, I honestly do respect the work he does, and I want him to keep doing it, I just take it with a *very* large grain of salt.

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