Curse

Bill Easternview · Mar 23, 2010, 04:06 AM // 04:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darcy

@Bill Easternview - And it is so easy to get an idea of the male/female spread instead of making uninformed assumptions. Here is a link to a poll done on this forum that gives a sample breakout of account owner's gender vs character gender.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/m...highlight=poll

Darcy,
Actually I wasn't making uninformed assumptions, Ms Etheredge was. Her Thesis was approved in Aug 2006, while the poll you linked to was conducted in Oct 2007, so she did not have it available to her. The sample size is good, 1850 respondents. The potential flaw with the survey though is its on the forums, not from Anet, so your sample is biased toward the GW players who use forums. But given the sample size, my own Thesis advisor said any sample size of 2000 or more was Golden, the results are probably pretty good. Would be interesting to run it again though.

Dreamrunner,
I would not want to draw too many conclusions from the content of the preview portion of the document. Some of the statements there which seem to me to be a bit dogmatic might be clarified or explained in the unavailable portion of the document. I don't plan on buying the whole document because, as I said, I don't consider this to be a really serious attempt to study MMORPG's. Maybe the author is working on a PhD and is lurking here at this very moment.

All,
I do think MMORPG's are worthy of serious academic study. But for many topics there would need to be serious involvement by the game company. Economics (both within game: why do Black dye prices spike when they do?, and about games: does the GW pricing model work better than the WoW monthy subscription?), sociology and psychology, gender studies, whatever the field of Time of Day studies is called (to follow the peak usage hours from timezone to timezone and nation to nation [relevant to network designers sizing servers]), geography (yeah, I know its a made up world, but what node to node paths do people follow and for what reasons?), computer forensics (identifying BOTS and gold sellers and scammers), computer programming (creating a wider range of actions for server controlled characters, and integrating those changes into quest design). Lots of fun things.

*Darcy* · Mar 25, 2010, 02:38 AM // 02:38

@Bill Easternview - I didn't mean you, I meant the author. And my point was how easy it is to get a sampling of account owner gender vs character gender.

As most people purchase this no-subscription game from retail vendors, ArenaNet would not have credit card info available even if they were willing to participate, thus a forum poll is the only way to get any real sampling.

As for the poll thread, it is still open. The last responses were this month. Go vote and add your new data, the older data is still relevant.