Daedalus Project updated
Nick Yee's excellent MMORPG survey and data site, the Daedalus Project, has been updated with new survey results on the following topics:
Guild demographics: What influences players to choose certain guilds, how attached they become, the likelihood of their knowing guildies in real life, and how long they stay. What I find fascinating here is the graph displayed above -- 26% of surveyed players have been with their guild 2 years or more. Alex Ziebart mentioned the other day that his guild has been together so long across multiple games that guild chat's gone from talk of teenage dates to coaching expectant parents through morning sickness. I get the feeling that this is only going to become more common in long-haul games like Second Life and WoW.
Character creation: How players choose characters, the elements of character selection they consider most important, and whether classes and races tend to be researched extensively before they're picked, or chosen based on impulse. Character class seems to matter to the most people; starting area the least.
Class type across MMORPG's: The single largest group of players in the previous survey believed that general class type (e.g. spellcaster, healer) mattered most for character selection, with 67% saying they tried to pick similar classes across different MMO's. Don't miss the comments section on this one, which has a note from someone who's actually playing WoW as part of a class project, and a reply from Mr. Yee on the difficulty of interpreting some of the survey results.
Characters per account and what makes a main a main: Women tend to have more characters than men do, and there's also a clear pattern of being more likely to devote time to multiple characters the older you are. The comments on this are also great.
Daedalus gathers information from tens of thousands of MMORPG players and not just World of Warcraft, but as you might imagine, WoW players are a fairly serious percentage of the survey population and have been the subject of their own articles. If you've never been to this extremely addictive site before, WoW Basic Demographics is a good place to start, "Does Horde pwn Alliance in PvP? A Baker's Dozen of Possible Reasons" is amazing, and you'll find more in the archives (arranged by category here).
