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Daedalus Project MMO Survey Updated

Nick Yee writes "The Daedalus Project, an ongoing online survey study of MMORPG players that started 4 years ago and has surveyed over 30,000 players, has published presentations of new findings, including whether players get more frustrated in MMOs or everyday life, quotes from players discussing why they play online games, and a statistical ranking of the motivations for MMORPG players. There's also a new multiple-choice survey MMO gamers can fill out."

3 of 11 comments (clear)

  1. Shameless plug? prehaps, but still my thoughs. by Brutus+(moo) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, I played Diablo II(I know it's not an MMORPG, read on) since about 2 months before the Lord of Destruction expansion came out for around 2 years, I had some strong characters on the USWest realm and I finally got tired of it after 2 years because of having 2 of every characters at level 99, and the economy went to heck back then.

    Now I started playing a MMORPG that was originally korean or chinese or something, but a few months ago went global and is free (for now), it is called MUOnline and at first glance I thought something like this "hm...Diablo II, worse grahpics, FREE!, more than 8 players per server" and now I play it, what do I do there? well, at first I killed spiders, then budge dragons, then bull fighters, then elite bull fighters, then beetle monsters...you get the picture, but it's still fun, both games consist of about the same thing and look similar and are all about clicking on monsters over and over and over again until they die, level up, move on to stronger monster, but people find that fun especially when you have hours of time to waste, and I find it fun too.

    Now, that's what people basically want now-adays from MMORPGs, (well, free ones, if compared to a p2p MMORPG MUOnline would be considered 1/50th as good), now comparing MU to D2 I can say this, most of the interface is similar, most of the basic game functions are too, but there are ofcourse some new stuff, such as obviously the more than 8 players per server thing, as well as things like the specific classes (which may be similar in concept, but have a new look and name), the specific weapons...but overall the game is about the same, it was popular back then, it's popular now (did I mention it's free?).

  2. Could you work slower? by MMaestro · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The Daedalus Project, an ongoing online survey study of MMORPG players that started 4 years ago and has surveyed over 30,000 players

    Four years? 30,000 players? Thats an average of 7,500 people surveyed each year on average. I know this doesn't exactly have the mass hordes of telephone callers like political parties, but that few responses? You'd think they woulda established some kinda method over that time, maybe streamlined the survey, or at least gotten more people. Or just hire some people in Korea and have them conduct surveys there, the number of responses would probably skyrocket.

    1. Re:Could you work slower? by ospen · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's several things: - This is an academic project with no commercial funding. - MMORPG players are becoming very cynical of surveys targeted at them. For example, see: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=1 &mid=1081006378898262613 - Recent MMORPGs have their own portals which draw most of the traffic and is much harder to publicize to those players. The other problem is that if it were publicized on the official site, then that would create suspicion of commercial motivation (which lowers response rates apart from damaging reputation). One might imagine doing online surveys at a targeted audience would be easier, but it turns out to be harder than it seems. The hardest thing is to build credibility as a researcher. After all, of all the survey links you have seen on the Net, how many have you completed? Nick