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Mining the World of Warcraft Armory

Many people have mined the World of Warcraft Armory for all sorts of information. Until recently, the data being mined out of the Armory was largely something I call “descriptive statistics”: statistics that are interesting in and of themselves, but don’t really require much more than counting up instances of labels. How many Orc hunters […]

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WoW Armory Data Mining: The Next Generation

Over at the Armory Data Mining blog, a plucky computational biology PhD student under the name of Darush has taken a look at some World of Warcraft Armory data and run some fascinating transformations to analyze the number of Druid players that favor bear form vs cat form when they play World of Warcraft. Note […]

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The quest for meaning

Quests are a commonly-used device in RPGs, MMO or otherwise. They are used to guide the player through the story and world in small, discrete steps. After playing just a few RPGs it is noticeable that there are a limited number of quest types.  Depending on how the lines are drawn, quests can easily be […]

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Virtually MMOs: On the term “Virtual Worlds”

Last weekend, I attended the first day of the Metaverse U conference hosted by Stanford University. I’d hazard around 50 people had made the trip, there to hear about “virtual worlds.” This year’s theme was most definitely the technical platforms on which virtual worlds could be run. While an interesting topic, I was there, waiting […]

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