We Can Fix That with Data

Buried away in an article on Zul’Aman, an aside to resurrect an old topic:

We were also told about a philosophical change at Blizzard, namely logical loot. Previously, the loot tables were somewhat random. They’re not going back and fixing years of content, but now, players can expect creatures to drop things that one would expect. If that bad guy is holding a big, shiny axe, then odds are his loot is a big shiny axe. This is a general goal and a monumental exercise in inter-departmental organization* (they need to make sure the artists and loot guys play nice with each other), but one they seem rather committed to. It’s a small touch, but it sure beats wolves coughing up fishing poles!

I’m crying on the inside. I bet the content guys are crying on the outside. I would.

* hahahahaha.

Keeping golf spectators safe:

The PGA now uses lasers to map the location of every shot by every competitor. Over a period of years, if the tour returns to a given course, the PGA is able to identify areas that are safe for fans to congregate, and it ropes the course accordingly, Combs said.

Via a colleague at NCsoft, Nielsen is yet again trying to get into game demographics to sell to marketers. They’ve tried this before, but failed. The old plan, in addition to the antiquated diaries they already use for television :

Nielsen intends to roll out two products this year, the more formidable one being a “tag” that PC, console, and online game developers can build into their software to be used by Nielsen to measure all sorts of in-game activity, especially response to advertising. This includes how people navigate through games, what levels they reach, and how long they spend on each level.

But, because tag placement requires the participation of game developers, Nielsen doesn’t expect the first tagged game to be released until the second half of 2005.

I suspect this also failed because the developers didn’t give a shit about “[measuring] all sorts of in-game activity.”

The new plan is a People Meter-style “audio scanning device.” I didn’t know how People Meters work, the devices they use to track television habits outside of the diaries, and Wikipedia’s article sucks, so I Googled it. Here’s a description of a portable one.

The Portable People Meter, developed by Arbitron Inc., is a pager-sized device that is carried by a representative panel of television viewers. It automatically detects inaudible codes that broadcasters embed in the audio portion of their programming using encoders provided by BBM and Arbitron. At the end of each day, the survey participants place the meters into base stations that recharge the devices and send the collected codes to BBM for tabulation. The Portable People Meter can measure exposure to any electronic media, which has audio that can be encoded – television, cable, and radio, even cinema advertising and in-store media.

I am not making this up, and Nielsen is planning to do the same thing with games: “the equipment detects each game’s unique ‘audio signature,’ compares it to the reference library of audio signatures compiled by Nielsen, and determines what games are being played when and where.”

Alrighty then!

They’re also getting data from Sony, which is much less bizarre: “which Sony games are being played, by whom, and for how long — ‘to enhance the data we are collecting and to give us the opportunity to take a hybrid-based approach to measurement.’”

They’re not specific, but I imagine they’re talking PS3 data. I’ve curious about how seriously Sony and Microsoft are taking their mountains of free data from online consoles — really, the Xbox 360 knows everything I play, for how long, what I do in game, when I log out, what TV and movies I watch, which DVDs I purchase. One would like to think that they’re using it to make the games better, instead of selling it to marketers so we might one day enjoy the wonders of dynamic advertising in everything we play, but hey.

“There are thirty years’ worth of future shock condensed into this one news item:” Charles Stross on explaining WoW gold spammers to someone from the ’70s.

Most World of Warcraft server forums maintain a list of which guild has gotten how far in each noteworthy raid instance. Here’s one, for example. They require a representative from the guild to post every time the guild manages to down another boss.

Via the Elitist Jerks forums comes an automated guild progression site, WowJutsu. According to the FAQ, it runs a script on the Armory and looks at guild members’ gear. If it sees my character wearing a drop from a specific raid boss, it assumes my guild has killed it.

This isn’t entirely accurate — at the low end of the raiding scale, players sometimes participate in multi-guild raids. Sometimes players don’t log out in their raid gear. The layout is cool for top-tier guilds with more than one raid icon to show, but for most crappy guilds on most crappy servers, most people only care how many bosses they’ve killed in Karazhan, and that requires a mouseover. The individual guild reports are pretty cool, though.

I was going to rant here about WoW guild recruitment tools and the lack thereof, but I’m just bitter that I ended up in a terrible guild when I was shopping a few months ago. Clearly, I didn’t read the progression thread. And while some kind of raid epeen rating in an EQ2-style in-game guild recruitment tool would make things even harder on these crappy little guilds, I sure wish that I would have had some more obvious warning.

– Edit, July 5
Brandon has some discussion on the percentage completion stats on the main page’s sidebar.