Check this out. 60TB of Everquest 2 logs handed over to researchers.

"What do you collect?"
"Well, everything—what do you want?"
"Can we have it all?"
"Sure."

The end result is a log that includes four years of data for over 400,000 players that took part in the game, which was followed up with demographic surveys of the users. All told, it makes for a massive data set with distinct challenges but plenty of opportunities.

Teh_linky

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/4989/evercrackyr7.jpg

results:
"people that play mmorgs are sad shutins"

Spookfail at article read:

The average age of players turned out to be 31. "These aren't just pasty white teenage boys in a basement—to be sure, they're there, but they're not typical," he said. The older players tended to play more than the kids and, although the total hours played seem large, he said that the time mostly displaced either TV watching or movie going. And the surveys showed that those who viewed TV news in the first place continued to do so, suggesting that gamers really slotted EQ2 into their entertainment time.

Mostly, the gamers seemed healthy; their body mass index was better than the US average and, although they were slightly more depressed than average, they were also less anxious.

sad

although they were slightly more depressed than average

spookwin!

sad

although they were slightly more depressed than average

spookwin!

Talk about selective reading, but anyway, every idiot is entitled to their opinion. That's how Rudd is the PM, amirite!?

/troll

"people that play mmorgs are sad shutins"

SING IT LOUD

Weird info they have. They certainly don't have my body mass index os if I am depressed or anxious on file (or do they?? : / )

Weird info they have. They certainly don't have my body mass index os if I am depressed or anxious on file (or do they?? : / )

Good point. I guess this was a question in the follow up survey.

Excerpt from follow-up survey

12. Are you more depressed than the average US citizen?

13. Are you more anxious than the average US citizen?

14. Is your Body Mass Index better than the average US citizen?

15. Do you seem healthy?

I don't play MMORPGs. I played Anarchy Online for about a week but that's it. I just thought as a researcher that would be a damn good dataset to get your hands on. If Blizzard hadn't already nailed the 'how to make games like crack' market then they would probably want a copy themselves.

The thing that bothers me about this is that's 60TB of data from 400,000 players for 4 years. Only 400k players!

Can you imagine what the logs would be like for WoW if they logged a similar level of detail? Both have been out around the same amount of time, WoW a bit longer, lets give WoW an average of 10m users (though granted you'd probably only get one regions logs, so maybe US might be 2.5 million), but we could potentially be talking about over 1500TB of log data if Blizzard kept it all for WoW!
What's that, 1.5PB? Somebody call Seagate quick and get them to start working on that.

Stupid questionnaire. If the other questions are as dumb as that, it's pretty uninformative.

You can find out a surprising amount of information about a person by not asking what you think they're asking.

Raven if Blizzard are smart they have varying rates of decay on logging, and they log the events not the text and store it in databases not text files.

EQ was the first mmo of it's kind. I'd call it 2nd gen.
Very different game and culture to WoW.

Stupid questionnaire.

Sony used frequently had stupid questionaires on login.

Stupid questionnaire. If the other questions are as dumb as that, it's pretty uninformative.

Haha, I made that questionnaire up, but anyway, lets pretend it's real. Stupid questionnaire...

Raven if Blizzard are smart they have varying rates of decay on logging, and they log the events not the text and store it in databases not text files.

EQ was the first mmo of it's kind. I'd call it 2nd gen.
Very different game and culture to WoW.

Except they are EverQuest 2 logs Obes.

oh ... eq2 was different again.

Didn't play it as much (about 3 months ?). EQ2 had a massively different culture to WoW.