Curse

Kit · Jan 07, 2011, 01:29 PM // 13:29

Hi,

I'm a Psychology student in my final year of university conducting a study on the motivations to play MMO's. I've been given the daunting task of finding 100 MMO players willing to take part, this is proving quite difficult! I'm hoping to get a more positive response than other forums I've posted on based on my experience with the Guild Wars community both in game and on the internet.

Hopefully I'm allowed to post a link to my study on the university website. If not I apologise in advance to the mods

http://www.bolton.ac.uk/HSS/Research/Psychology/KS.aspx

If you have any questions feel free to ask

If you choose to take part please email me (or pm me, its probably a lot easier) the address bar of BOTH questionnaires results pages. Without the link I have no idea what results you obtained.

Both of these questionnaires are created by other people, I would of course like more answer options on the questionnaires but It's something I cant change unfortunately.

Some people have also reported problems navigating the personality questionaire (the yellowy green one) I myself don't seem to have this problem, but if you cant scroll down try to use the arrow keys on your keyboard.

Some people have been a reluctant to share information such as age and gender via the questions at the end of the personality questionnaire. You don't have to fill out those questions (all I'm personally interested in is the personality part) but they do help the researcher who conducted the questionnaires to see trends and patterns.

Thank you!

Ailina · Jan 08, 2011, 05:41 AM // 05:41

Hey, I'm looking through the test, and I found that while it does start out fairly general, as you get about halfway in or so, it get increasingly WoW-specific. There are many questions which would simply make no sense at all to players whose only experience in an MMO is Guild Wars; many of the questions discuss things that are conceptually alien in this game (such as an the concept of taverns and items that can be used in pvp, as well as things like "bringing a wizard to indentify things"; what does that mean?!?), and many of the questions revolve around the assumption that the world is uninstanced, like WoW, and that players can attack you at any time, something which simply cannot happen in GW.

In addition, it assumes that experience points / gaining levels are valuable (while in GW, the level cap is 20, and after that, experience points are pretty much useless -- you use them to buy skills, but you get all the experience you'll ever need just from playing through the game once, so at that point, having only experience points as a quest reward is the same as having no reward).

I found that I was able to take the first part of the test easily, but since I've never played WoW, many of the questions literally looked like gibberish to me. I tried my best to get through the survey, but I realized that since most of my answers were literally a random choice (for those questions, the gibberish ones, I just closed my eyes and pointed at the screen

), my results would be entirely invalid.

It seems like a good study for WoW players, but I'm afraid that any results you'd get here would have to be from players who've played WoW, and if they're on the GW forums instead of the WoW ones...
Let's just say things are biased.

But honestly, good luck in your studies!
By the way, I'm sorry if I came off as a little harsh, I'm too exhausted to do anything but cut straight to the chase.

Kit · Jan 08, 2011, 06:33 PM // 18:33

Ailina thanks for your view and I can understand were you're coming from.

I feel that the Guild Wars approach to the MMO genre is unique which is why it appealed to me the first place. Most MMOs share similar game dynamics to WoW, (at least in my opinion) with more emphasis on XP and levelling etc.

It's my hope that some people on these forums have experienced a few MMO's which from personal experience seems to be the case. I myself have tried a few since I stopped playing Guild Wars when most of my guildies moved to WoW.

Unfortunately neither of these questionnaires were made by me which means I cant edit questions or turn off that annoying DNAbot chap :P that's why its important that when people take part they message me their results!

This sort of constructive criticism is useful because it can be used to improve the study if I choose to continue it. Unfortunately its too late to really think about changing the questionnaires (or making my own) due to deadlines.

Plus I've had much harsher critics on other forums that have not offered and further advice just criticisms which can be disheartening.

Thank you for taking the time out to attempt the questionnaires anyway.

Lord Mip · Jan 08, 2011, 07:06 PM // 19:06

I indeed think the first test is relatively narrow and may not prove the true results you are looking for.
Nevertheless, it's still very well doable. The second one is much better. I filled it in, hope it'll help you.

The Baphomet · Jan 08, 2011, 08:57 PM // 20:57

I think the questions of the first one are silly. I am completely uninterested in actual roleplay and fighting against a poorly scripted boss to get an electronic item.