[MUD-Dev] Mining the SW:G Forums

[Eric L. Rhea]

This morning I had available a few hours to pick through a curiosity
of mine and put together this small data set available [1] from part
of an ongoing series of discussions on the SW:G forum[4]. EQ is an
amazingly successful game, I find it really interesting trying to
dissect it and determine what makes it tick. A shame time doesn't
exist in enough quantity at the present to finish off the thread and
do the others . ah well, so it goes. :)

This data shows the result of 358 responses to the question of "What
are the good and bad of EQ"? The webpage has some handy charts to
visualize the data, in addition to the data source I used to make
them. To compose the data, I generalized each statement by the
player, ignoring those who posted off topic, and made no limitation
to the number of comments one player could make. For the curious,
the data source has a list of who made what comment, how many G, B
and more.

I've archived the discussion of all the bulk topics (excluding the
theorized SW variant) as of 9.1.2001. [2]
 
Taking this liberally, there seem to be some relationships
happening.  Roughly the same number of people for "Emphasis on
Grouping" have strong feelings for "Overemphasis on Grouping", that
time sinks of any kind are inherently bad, that "Useless Quests"
ranks up there with "Weak trade/craft skills", that MOB AI is
actually quite important to players (perhaps future systems will
have more than just path finding algorithms?), and that the
"Administration" seems linked with the "Static Nature of the
World". I also find it interesting that the heaviest factors are
time sink oriented and content based, and the overall weight of
importance that players place on "Eye Candy".

Special Kudos to the SW:G team [3]

-Eric

References:
[1] http://www.enkanica.com/MUD-DEV/Research/EQ/Data/EverQuest_Good_andthe_Bad.htm
[2] http://www.enkanica.com/MUD-DEV/Research/Data/GBOfMMOGs-9.1.2001.pdf
[3] http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/
[4] http://boards.station.sony.com/ubb/starwars/Forum3/HTML/019263.html


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