Figure 1: Graph demonstrating that Aluminio’s reported character played times add up to more time possible in 4 years

In a previous post, I said that a player’s /played time in World of Warcraft (WoW) can be used a good indication of their experience in WoW.  In my 2010 April survey, I asked respondents to report their /played time for three types of characters: their first character ever created, the character on which they currently spend most of their time, and the character on which they enjoy playing the most. If the characters were the same, they were asked to repeat the information. When I did my calculation, I ignored any entries that were obvious duplicates. I also asked people to make an estimate to the nearest half year of how long they had been playing World of Warcraft.

While entering data in from my 2010 April survey, I noticed that case S1-025 contained /played numbers that did not add up.  In the raw survey data, the participant—whom I have called “Aluminio”—listed 3 characters:

1. Human priest ranged, played more than 700 days
2. Gnome mage ranged, played more than 900 days
3. Human paladin tank, played more than 900 days.

That adds up to more than 2500 days. Aluminio also reported playing World of Warcraft for a total of 4 years, which amounts to 1460 days. That’s far, far short of the more than 2500 days claimed for playing his three characters, as is clearly evident in Figure 1′s graph. It is impossible for someone on their own to have played all 1460 days 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Credit: Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Figure 2: Graph showing how much of a four-year period would have been spent on each of Aluminio’s characters.

My first thought was to wonder if they were using bought accounts.  In which case the /played time would include the time the original person spent on the account and, if these were all bought accounts, then the time would overlap potentially with survey participant’s personal playing time.  It need not just be someone who has bought someone else’s account either.  A player named “Sodiumo” in my guild took over the account of a friend who stopped playing.

My partner mentioned a second possibility: multiboxing. This is where a person has multiple account and multiple instances of the game running.  You set each of the other characters to follow the character you are actually playing as you take them through dungeons.  This would accumulate /played time on all the logged in characters, even though the person is really only actively playing one character.

A third possibility is the person had multiple accounts and someone else helped them play each character.   There are several similar cases in my own guild.  For example, a player we will call “Carbona” is the primary player on his account for questing, socializing, and raiding.  He lets his son, however, engage in player versus player encounters on his character.  Another player, whom we will call “Chlorinella”, ended up taking over the account of her brother who lost interest in the game; Now that Cataclysm, the latest World of Warcraft expansion, has been released, the brother has returned to playing.

Finally, a fourth possibility that occurred to me just now is that Aluminio may have made estimates of his /played time for each character instead of checking the /played time in game. I did provide instructions on how to obtain the /played time, but it is not outside the realms of possibility. Many people, myself included, are very poor at estimating time spent when it’s on and off again across multiple accounts, but we are far more accurate about how many total years (in calendar time) we have been playing because that can be easily tied to a fixed date.

When I designed the survey, I did not take into account that people might have been cheating, purchasing accounts, or account sharing.  Basing my estimate of their World of Warcraft experience on the /played time in such a circumstance is not very accurate.  The initial person who triggered this off is willing to be contacted if I have further questions and there is an e-mail address, so I think that would be a good thing to follow up on.

Related posts:

1. /played Time as a Measure of WoW Experience When working with people's experience in World of Warcraft, their /played time is a more accurate measure than calendar time....

Our research is based on participant- observation fieldwork. Each of us created at least two characters and joined at least one guild. We have jointly played for over 25 months and continue to play.

How much experience did they really have in World of Warcraft? Was the 25 months calendar time or in-game time? These are the questions that immediately went through my mind. I quickly concluded that it was not  25 months of in-game time as that would be more than 18,000 hours of play. Even among three people, that seemed unlikely even if they had been playing since the game was released. That led me to think about measuring game experience in immersive worlds, like World of Warcraft.

Typing “/played” in World of Warcraft will tell a player how many days, hours, and minutes they have spent online since creating that character.  This can be a more useful measure of a player’s experience with the game than elapsed calendar time.   For example, I have been playing since World of Warcraft’s public release date in February 2005.  My /played time is 268 days on my main character over a 69-month period.   Contrast that with someone else who, over that same period, only plays two hours a week.  Their /played time would be about 25 days (see Figure 2). I obviously have more experience in the game, even though our elapsed calendar time is identical.  There is an assumption there that I spent the time doing something in the game and not just chatting or idling, but it is going to be a more accurate measure of experience.

Credit: Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Figure 1: Screenshot of questions in April survey

I asked respondents to report their /played time for three types of characters: their first character ever created, the character on which they currently spend most of their time, and the character on which they enjoy playing the most. If the characters were the same, they were asked to repeat the information. When I did my calculation, I ignored any entries that were obvious duplicates.

On the first page of my April 2010 survey, I had a set of questions asking people about the “/played” time for various types of characters they had played in the game (see Figure 1).  When I designed the survey, I wanted a feel for how much time people had spent on various characters.  I was not, unfortunately, thinking about their total WoW experience time.  Now that I am coding the data in NVivo, I am examining the data and combining the /played times they gave me (where it is obviously not for the same character) to get a rough idea of their minimum World of Warcraft experience.  In hindsight, I realize that I could have kept the original question, but I should have also asked people to calculate their /played time across all of their characters.   That would enable me to more accurately and easily compare what people have learned with the same amount of in-game play time rather than by using the far slipperier and less informative elapsed calendar time. Lessons learned and all that!

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Joy of Stats Book Cover

I have been working recently on importing data into SPSS from the first part of my April survey on World of Warcraft motivations. This has been a fairly straightforward process for the most part. The exception is the last question about the respondent’s guild type and purpose. The question was presented as the following:

In a short sentence (140 characters), describe the primary purpose of the guild in which you spend most of your time, or enter “no guild”.

Example: I’m in a social guild that believes in random acts of kindness. We love to dance but we also raid end-game content with other casual guilds.

I am not happy with how the coding for the type and purpose is going. When I created the SPSS codebook for that part of the survey, I initially broke it down into two parts: a type and a primary purpose. The type represented a breakdown primarily between “social” and “hardcore”. The purpose could be a key activity or a purpose. The divisions were chosen based on an an initial review of the received responses (see Table 1).

The “No guild” choice is self-evident. “Not codable” was intended for responses like “Forks” or “I am an herbalist in my guild”. This was usually where the respondent had not answered the question correctly, so no type or purpose could be determined. “No identifiable activity” was intended for responses like “Social”, where no obvious activity was ascertainable.

Andrew and I independently coded the 51 responses according to type and activity. We were allowed to use general knowledge about World of Warcraft but not specific knowledge about any guilds or people if identifiable somehow from the response. The response itself had to dictate the type and purpose.

We almost completely agreed on “type”, but we disagreed by about 28% on the “activity”. If an answer mentioned raiding and that seemed more key than anything else included (or nothing else was included), I coded it as “raiding”. Andrew often coded it as “fun” because he felt the raiding was deprecated or a lesser part even if it was the only thing mentioned. So, for example, if someone said something like “I’m in a social guild and we also do some raiding”, Andrew coded that as “fun”, because the “also raid” was a lesser thing, whereas I would have said “raiding”.

To fix that, he suggested that we add a category that indicated the amount of raiding. I would then have “raiding” and “some raiding”. That seemed sensible, but then left the question of what the “primary” purpose of the guild was if “some raiding” was ancillary. While the survey specifically asked for the primary purpose, but many of the responses, likely because of the poorly chosen example, included one or more activities. When coding, that meant the coder had to pick the one activity that seemed most prominent.

A colleague, in discussion about the first attempt at coding, suggested going for as wide a range of activities as possible before cutting back. I had, for example, initially omitted “performing random acts of kindness”, which occurred fairly often, as an activity. She thought that should be added as well as “social.” Social” as an activity was omitted because I was using the “social” designator appearing in responses to code for the guild type. However, in retrospect, it occurred to me it would be even more appropriate if I changed the guild type to be as interpreted by me based on my assessment of the respondent’s answer; the question did not ask the respondent to specify their guild type but to describe the purpose. I need to stay true to the question’s intent.

A modified codebook then would look something like Table 2.

That does mean that I need more formal definitions of “social”, “hardcore”, and “casual” then to use for the coding guild type. It also means there is a question about how many activities to code, given that very few responses only mentioned one purpose or activity. While the question did ask for a primary activity, I do not have a problem per se with coding for more activities. The questions are then: how many and should order be significant?

Open Issues for Comment and Resolution

• Is the second draft draft more sane in terms of how type and activity are determined in general?
• What are some existing formal definitions of guild types that can be used?
• How many purposes or activities should be coded?
• If multiple activities or purposes are coded, is the order significant? That is, should I assume that the first thing mentioned is the most important, the second, the next, and so on?

Any opinions or help are appreciated, as this type of analysis is new to me.

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1. High /Played Times and Meaning Reasons why someone's /played time, used as a measure of experience in World of Warcraft, might be inaccurate....