Interesting results...Follow

My name is Matt, and I've been a gamer since I was a wee lad, playing q-bert to exhaustion and a toy story game that had me captivated for a large chunk of my childhood. I got into console gaming shortly after, playing pokemon almost religiously and spyro the dragon to 100% completion. In highschool, I entered the call of duty scene and played competitively for about a year and a half, and won a few local tournaments here and there. I entered college without any World of Warcraft experience, but when I had to play it for a class, I was hooked.

We were asked to do research based on the game, which kind of takes away from the fun. But nonetheless, my partner and I came across some interesting results. The point of our research was to come up with a model for experience gained in each race and compare it to how fast a player must undergo learning in the first chunk of quests in game. Interestingly, the large and dark races gained experience the fastest, and the cute and lithe races gained experience the slowest. It's as if people that pick big scary guys are more achievement oriented and thus need a higher rate of increase to make them feel better about themselves. Heck, I certainly feel better when I get more experience, achievement might as well be my middle name.

Another weird thing though was that we found that gold never really had a steady rate of increase. The amount of gold came a bit randomly, and never really reached a useful amount until exceptionally difficult quests were completed. We came up with the conclusion that Blizzard didn't want players to continue playing just for the gold, but rather that they'd want to keep going simply for love of the game. Because gold farming is a bit of a problem in the metagame, we figured this was for the best.

Just thought I would share these results, see what the community thinks. Let me know what you think and how we could improve, and if you want some more specifics.

Eh, I'll allow it for now.

Personally, I found your info to be very interesting.

Thanks for sharing! :-)

University of Denver, eh?

Crap, I owe someone ten bucks.

Perhaps I can help here.

The "I entered college without any World of Warcraft experience, but when I had to play it for a class, I was hooked." could translate roughly to "I'm new at this game but understand it better than you." That's a bit of a bungle perhaps, and can't really be helped to some degree, but it's a bad way to start. (Strike 1)

When paired with some random finding like "Interestingly, the large and dark races gained experience the fastest, and the cute and lithe races gained experience the slowest" without any supporting data, doesn't help increase that opinion any. I mean, it's just the type of thing that would usually get dismissed as an error on your part as Blizzard has largely worked to equalize things like that in-game. Can't say your observations about the gold thing are any different. It's generally a good idea to support any odd claims about a game with data when posting in a place like this. (Strike 2)

We're already familiar with the University of Denver class, and it's not highly thought of here. Again, not your fault, but it doesn't help any. (Strike 3)

3 reasons I imagine you didn't receive useful answers.

If you really want my opinion on what you've found I'd say it sounds like the kind of thing some undergraduate "researcher" would pull out of a game they're not familiar with as part of an assignment for a class. It's great for learning about how to do a study, but outside of a learning environment the findings are somewhere between flawed and useless. I suspect flawed data collection techniques led you to your odd conclusions about the game. However I have no way to check that, so it really wasn't worth bringing up since it really isn't constructive in any way.

Edited, Jun 6th 2012 1:16pm by someproteinguy