A Large-Scale, Longitudinal Study of Player Achievements in World of Warcraft

A survey of usage of the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, World of Warcraft, and correlates achievements with motivations based upon a previously-defined motivation model, and classify players based on the categories of achievements that they pursued.

Abstract

We present a survey of usage of the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, World of Warcraft. By mining publicly available data, we collected a dataset consisting of the player history for approximately six million characters, with partial data for another six million characters. This paper focuses on player achievement data in particular, exposing trends in play from this highly successful game. From this data, we present several findings on players' play styles. We correlate achievements with motivations based upon a previously-defined motivation model, and then classify players based on the categories of achievements that they pursued. Experiments show players who fall within each of these buckets can play differently, and that as players progress through game content, their play style evolves as well.