Slashdot Mirror
How Gamers View Their MMOs
GamerDNA is trying out what they call their Discovery Engine, a system that uses metadata from users to classify games and identify which have similar traits. Massively describes it thus: "Once the gamerDNA community continues to contribute to something like this, it builds up an enormous database of terminology based on actual player knowledge, not just shiny PR words thrown together to promote a game. These search terms can end up being unique to a specific genre, and ultimately lead gamers to exactly the types of games they're looking for." GamerDNA tested the system out on some of the popular MMOs, and they've posted the results. They look at how MMO players identify themselves within the game, how they describe the setting, and what basic descriptive phrases they use in reference to the games.
As a fellow Eve player, I do have to admit that on the surface the game seems to be grinding to an extreme. Mission grinding, Mining grinding, Pirate hunting grinding, etc. etc. If you never get out of the basic levels of gameplay in Eve, it will be an incredibly dull game and that is something I freely admit to anyone who is interested in getting into the game. However, I also make a point of stressing that Eve is also a game that you get out of it what you put into it. If you do choose to step out of that initial box, you'll find a game packed with political maneuvering, tense pvp combat, business simulation, and more. You have to go after it for yourself though, it won't be handed to you on a silver platter. This is definitely not a game for the anti-social.
So what do you think of stuff like this?
http://digg.com/pc_games/EVE_Creators_CCP_Under_Fire_Again_for_Alleged_Corruption_Open_Letter_Made
> Yeah evidently not displaying the fringe 0,0001% of the world's MMO population is a grievuous crime of bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapleStory
Both bigger than WoW.
Who's in the 0.0001% now? :)
They put up some pretty useless graphs with very little information about how they arrived at those numbers and how they interpret them. It's worthless to make any inferences about all gamers without explaining their data.
First of all, they provide no checks for problems such as autocorrelation or multicollinearity between their various survey categories. That aside, it doesn't look like they even did any regression analysis at all. They, in effect, said "duhh, this is 10% of all the answers so it must mean something!". Bull. Just because the response rate for a particular category is 10% doesn't mean it is statistically significant in the academic sense.
Sorry, but as a professional data analyst, I get really pissed when people collect some (possibly non-random) data, do some half-assed analysis, post some pretty colors on a graph and say "Eureka! I haz solved wurld peez!"