Science gleans 60TB of behavior data from Everquest 2 logs

Science gleans 60TB of behavior data from Everquest 2 logs

arstechnica.com

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.

(visit the link for the full news article)

I don't know how many on here play these games but I do know that ALOT of players give each other ALOT of private information in chat and those are logged to ! This can become a pretty big lawsuit against Sony I sure hope they got all their lawyers in order.
Not to mention alot of players also give each other username and passwords to their accounts.


arstechnica.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by Sakrateri

I always wondered when someone would look at MMO's in a scientific manner. The social dynamics of these games in some respects are pretty valuable.

I would be more interested in the data Second Life has rather than Everquest though. Second Life would have a bigger cross section of society as a whole.

I agree pavil.

I doubt any lawsuit will come of this, I think it's pretty neat actually. I kinda wonder why they chose EQ2?

(Could it be that the EQ2ers are more socially advanced than WoWers, I think so )

i doubt there will be a lawsuit. everquest probably hid something in the TOC that stated this but no one ever reads those. as for the study itself i doubt they will find anything useful.

Yes it will be in the T&C that your whole family and your pet cat belong to the game developers. The amount of smallprint you need to agree to in those MMOs is beyond belief. Somewhere in there it will say that basically you have no right to stop them using any data they can get about you.

Blizzard recently released a patch which added a feature to the program which gleans information about your computer. If you don't like that you can't play WoW.

I for one would be intersted to see what the data collected consists of. From what I could gather from the article no identifying info involved. It seems that have 60TB of "I beat this monster, bought this ring and played with these players in this dungeon." I doubt there would be any lawsuits involved, as has already been stated the T&C probably have it covered already.
The WoW patch to my knowledge is to gather system specs. It will help Blizzard determine the average system playing WoW so that they can better tweak the system to allow the best gameplay. Nothing nefarious there.

reply to post by barrelmaker


I consider how nefarious or not the patch is to be kinda besides the point. There is no opt out. When I bought my copy of wow I was only interested in playing a game, not supplying a company with free information they are too cheap or lazy to research without invading people's computers.

I think there should be an opt out. Not a "if you don't like it, tough balls" patch which forces it on anyone who wants to keep playing. It's exactly the same as the updates which are forced onto anyone who has an Xbox 360. The console updates are mandatory. Do you like how the old dashboard looked? Tough luck. Oh and another thing about that dashboard update. It was too big to fit on a memory card, forcing me and millions of others to go and spend £60 on a hard drive just so we could continue using our consoles.

Usually I wouldn't care. But I've been a gamer for over 20 years, and the way the industry has changed recently in regards to how it treats it's customers is pretty disgusting.

I think a lot of people would be surprised at what a good team of social and cognitive scientists could get out of this. Just reading the article, it seems like they are seeing just about every type of real social interaction represented in the game's logs.

I ran a Guild on EQ

There is definitely information that could be useful.

If I can run 120 people motivated for a single task, how exactly I can do that has to be useful to some corporate dork somewhere.

HAHA Maybe they will discover the Truth

To be the boss you have to be the best, earn respects by skill, log the most hrs, be reliable, help others and fairly share the treasure!!!!!

Perhaps they will learn from these games that Employee motivation can't come when you horde all the gold for yourself, care about no one and suck at your job.

Of course...

when they get that data they will suppress it and then leave your accounts alone.

Isnt World of Warcraft a bigger game? Every age group is attracted to that game... With all the marketing to people of every age (their commercials, numerous mountain dew drinks with themes named after the game, etc) i think that World of warcraft would provide some pretty interesting info. Mostly useless babble though im sure of it. Occasionally there are some heated discussions going on about our economy and whatnot, but mostly people nerd raging.

Besides conversations and guild management they also have playing times, class choices, lack in playing time (has anyone ever noticed how if you cancel your account they ask why?), maximum levels and more.

It's difficult to explain to someone who has never played these types of games why this information would be useful but it could be. They take a massive amount of time, and skill to play (well, I should add). I tend to prefer a healing role in these types of games or other types of casters. So, in my gaming experience I have learned to not get hit. I dodge potential aggressors and focus all of my energy on one particular target (when playing a damage focused character). I do prefer to do the job of healing which means that I keep the group alive. It's not that I don't trust anybody else to do the job, I would just rather be in control of that particular role. That type of information could be useful.

Well..Sony never listens to its player base, so maybe 60T of data and a team of scientist will finally convince them that the NGE was a mistake

I also find it amazing that despite all the data SOE seems to collect, they can't get a handle on all the gold selling, and spamming. Maybe its not as bad in EQ/EQ2. I'll admit I'm limited to swg and vg. (I've also spent time in WoW, AoC, and Shadowbane).

I've always had this theory that companies like SOE get some kind of kick-back or under the table money to allow gold selling. Its a huge business, their can't be much official oversight and I have a hard time believing you can't come up with technology/programing to squash it if you really wanted to.

whats Everquest ?

Is that like facebook ?

or mySpace ?

or WOW ?

or microsoft ?

or google ?

or......

When the digital angel comes out just get chipped up because then you won't have to read the EULA's... or remember your Everquest account info. they've put it on your chip already.
Haven't you been paying attention.