SubscribeEJ Posters Read Legal Briefs So I Don’t Have To
July 15, 2008 5:20 pm
Blizzard’s statement in the Blizzard/Glider lawsuit says that players take an average of 480 hours to reach level 70, and they play for an average of two hours a day. (Links to statements, concise quote.) Part of Blizzard’s argument was that botting robbed them of subscription fees because of increased leveling speed. That’s pretty funny.
Playtime is a metric that companies don’t often post. I’m so sick of “20 hours a week” — Nick Yee’s eight-year-old Everquest 1 figure, determined by self-selected survey. Is it true? Was it ever true? Who knows?
Makaze wrote:
Considering the longer total time to level cap and the lack of casualness in EQ1 3 hours per day rather than 2 seems pretty likely for an average user.
Posted on 15-Jul-08 at 6:52 pm | Permalink
TickledBlue wrote:
Is this Blizzards first step towards instituting hourly subscription rates?
By that argument, if I was an obsessive compulsive insomniac who did nothing but play WoW, I too would be robbing Blizzard of subscription fees? I truely hope that that statement was not part of the decision that let them win against Glider, it could get to a point where anyone who goes into a raid dungeon that’s known to take more than this mythical 2 hours is automatically accused of stealing from poor Blizzards coffers.
By charging a monthly subscription fee didn’t Blizzard set the playing field? Its a bit rich that they can turn around now and claim that they only meant ‘a month or 60 hours… whichever comes first’.
Posted on 15-Jul-08 at 9:04 pm | Permalink
Darius K. wrote:
“X hours a week” is the wrong way to look at things anyway: it takes a complex distribution of numbers and attempts to distill it down to a single number. What we did on LOTRO was segment our players: who is playing 10 hours a week or less, who plays 10-30, and who is 30+, for example. These different groups will show different kinds of play styles.
Even better is to find play styles that correlate strongly to play time, so for example, your crafters spend X hours/week, your fighters spend Y hrs/wk, and your traders spend Z hrs/wk. Use those numbers instead of an overall average!
Always remember, a distribution curve that looks like this \__/ could have the same average as a distribution curve that looks like this /—\. Or as Bart Kosko puts it, don’t trust the sample mean.
Posted on 16-Jul-08 at 9:40 am | Permalink
Sara Jensen Schubert wrote:
Darius is right about the actual value of the number. I still think this new data point is worth a mention because I swear, so many times the mainstream press or non-MMO gamers talk about MMOs, they say “golly, people actually play these games 20 hours a week!” Which always drives me nuts. (Of course, I can’t find any examples right quick now, but I swear!)
Posted on 17-Jul-08 at 2:48 pm | Permalink
Dave Rickey wrote:
Actually, “20 Hours a week” is about what Nick Yee found in WoW as well. It’s also what he found in Camelot, and I think I can explain the discrepency: If I excluded “People who didn’t log in at all” from the data, my numbers matched pretty well with Nick’s. Blizzard presumably was taking an average for all accounts, including those that are lying fallow, paid for but not used. A surprising number of accounts can fall into that category at any given time.
–Dave
Posted on 17-Jul-08 at 4:34 pm | Permalink
Dave Rickey wrote:
I might add, the exact quote was “Whereas a typical human player averaging two hours a day would thus need eight months to reach the highest level, a Glider user can run the bot and achieve the same level in less than one month.”
They didn’t say that the *average* player put in 2 hours a day, they said a “typical” player *could*. The “typical” player might be the median rather than the mean (where 80-hour a week catassers would pull up the average disproportionately). Or it might be just an arbitrary example they pulled out of their ass to illustrate the argument.
–Dave
Posted on 17-Jul-08 at 4:39 pm | Permalink
John Hopson wrote:
Two tiny thoughts:
- Averages tend to be particularly bad in these sorts of estimates because the high end players are extreme outliers and pull the average way up. Medians tend to be a lot more helpful, along with median tenure in the game.
- The “20 hours a week” number is probably more reflective of the 40 hour standard work week than anything to do with the games themselves. I suspect we’d find similar numbers if we did a study of how much time a sports fan spends watching sports on tv, etc. It’s a measurement of the amount of disposable free time we have, not a direct measurement of the game.
Posted on 18-Jul-08 at 10:48 am | Permalink
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Posted on 30-Oct-08 at 3:45 am | Permalink