WoW Survey Results: behind the scenes of "crossplay"

I tend to round to two decimal places for all the stuff I do, just so you know. I like two decimal places because it's the same level of accuracy that you get with money; so it feels specific without being overly so.

During the writing of my post on crossplay, I encountered a problem. When I was looking at the difference in crossplay between the young and the old group, I wanted a way to talk about whether a particular increase for a race or class was more or less than the average increase. I've included a small sample of one of those tables below.

Crossplay by age for race
	Younger	Older
Average	27.62%	34.65%
Human	31.28%	41.51%
Troll	16.67%	26%

You'll notice that the last column has been removed also. That's because that's exactly what we're here to talk about. My first instinct for that last column, which I'll just refer to as the "change" column, was to just to take the difference. This would give us a difference of 10.23 for the humans and 9.33 for the trolls. I didn't like that, though, because I felt that the trolls' gain was more significant since they started off much lower than the humans.

My next instinct was to try ratios (division) for the last column. This would give the humans a result of 1.33, a ~33% increase, and the trolls a result of 1.56, a ~56% increase. While this looks good for these two numbers, I actually have conceptual problems with this as well. Suppose I included a third race here for which the young group had 90% female characters and 100% female characters for the older group. This would give us a result of 1.11 (repeating, of course). I feel that's too low though; going from having 10% male characters to zero is a pretty significant thing. So I wanted something that will scale well at the low end and at the high end. Just as gaining 10 percentage points is a big deal when you have very little, such as the trolls, it's also a big deal when there's not much left to pick from, such as for this hypothetical race.
So it occurred to me that just considering how many female characters there were would be insufficient, and that I would also need to look at how many male character there were. This is when I turned to looking at the odds. In short (if you don't want to read that link), the odds of something happening is the probability that it will happen divided by the probability it won't happen. So if the odds of something happening are 10:1, it's 10 times more likely to happen than to not happen. So I decided to look at the ratio of the odds for each age group, or as I summarized in the last post

where p is the percentage of female characters for that group. When I did all the calculations and thought about how I felt about the results, everything just looked right. The values that I felt should be bigger than others were all that way. 

So if you're wondering how this stuff get's done; that's how. It's trial, error, and intuition.

WoW Survey Results: Looking at crossplay

Actually a dude

There's a bit of an adage about World of Warcraft that the men are men, and so are the women. This is to say that no matter what the gender of the character you're looking at is, it's likely a guy playing that character. Now, given the percentage of female players that some studies have shown and the percent of the time that players of both genders play oppositely-gendered characters, this is actually unlikely.

For this article, and forever on until I manage to find a better one, I will use the term "crossplay" to refer to when a person plays a character whose gender is different from their gender.

In general, from my survey results, male respondents engaged in crossplay ~33.96% of the time and female respondents engaged in crossplay ~9.19% of the time. Right of the bat we see that men engage in crossplay far more than women do, almost 4 times as much. If you ask, most male players would likely tell you that you spend all of your time in this game looking at your character's butt and they would like to enjoy looking at what is presented to them.

Is that all there is too it? Guys, why do (or don't) you play female characters? Ladies, why do (or don't) you play male characters? Well, we can look at this ourselves a bit while we wait for potentially helpful comments. Let's get some breakdowns in here. Unfortunately, as in the past, I can't supply a breakdown of crossplay for female respondents due to an insufficient volume of female respondents. I'm so totally bummed about that. So, if I fail to stipulate it later on, I'm just talking about crossplay by male players.

Percent of crossplay for male respondents for each class
Priest	Paladin	Mage	Shaman	Rogue	Druid	Hunter	Warlock	Death Knight	Warrior
49.21	40.57	38.62	34.04	32.81	31.53	29.88	28.78	27.59	24.66

What immediately springs out for me is something that I've noticed before. We find the warlock, Death Knight and warrior are at the bottom of a list. We saw this before when I was looking at gender and class, when those were 3 of the 4 least played classes for female respondents. It's interesting that three of the four least played classes for female respondents are the least crossplayed classes for male respondents. Although pinpointing why it's this way will have the same troubles that we had back then. The correlations between armor type, role, location in battle, and theme will confuse the analysis. We also see that our light-wielders, the priest and the paladin, hold solid leads in the top spots with the cloth-wearing mage in the third spot. Let's look at this a few different ways.

Average crossplay by armor type
Cloth	Leather	Mail	Plate
38.87	32.17	31.95	30.94

This table shows a pretty clear trend that indicates that as you go from the lighter armor types to the heavier armor types, the average amount of crossplay by male respondents decreases. This probably plays into the aesthetics of the armor as many male players probably don't imagine a male hero wearing a robe or a female hero wearing bulky plate.

Average crossplay by role
	No Heal	Heal
No Tank	32.52	41.61
Tank	26.13	36.05

This table show us that healers tend to have more crossplay while tanks tend to have less crossplay. Does this show that male players consider tanking to be a masculine role and healing to be a feminine role?

Average crossplay by fight location
Melee	Mix	Ranged
28.35	35.37	36.62

Here we can see that male players tend to crossplay less with characters in melee and more with characters at range. I feel less certain that this one plays into real feelings and feel that it may just be a correlation with the effects of role and armor type.

The three tables above really break down what I think are some of the predominant factors that influence whether a male player will crossplay. I think that armor type and how it affects aesthetics and role/fighting location and how that affects perception really make up the most of it. I'll admit that I am not immune to this as well, but I'll get into that after this next section. Now let's look at how race influences crossplay.

Percent of crossplay for male respondents for each race
Draenei	NE	BE	Human	Gnome	Goblin	Worgen	Undead	Troll	Dwarf	Orc	Tauren
59.70	52.87	52.60	40.64	35.77	31.36	25.33	22.94	21.72	14.83	13.92	12.80

There is some wide variance here, huh. Analyzing the races is different since they can't be broken into groups as easily as classes can be. The thing that tends to stick out to me, is the comparative of the female model, especially when that is compared to the male model. We see that the female models that are the most attractive (according to human standards, of course) are at the top of this list. I have complete faith that the patented female Draenei hip wiggle has played no small role in vaulting them to the front of this list. Gnomes, while certainly not having human proportions, are much like tiny humans, which is probably the factor that has placed them in the number 5 spot above all the "monstrous" races and the dwarves. Interestingly, although dwarves are quite human, moreso than the gnomes in my opinion, they are at tenth place here. I guess guys just tend to be too shallow for them. They probably couldn't handle a playing a dwarven lady anyway. One last table for this section, you probably noticed this yourself with the last one.

Crossplay by faction
Alliance	Horde
38.19%	25.89%

This combined with the fact that the Horde has fewer female players than the Alliance means that the Horde is a bit of a sausage fest, comparatively. Sorry Horde bros, that's just the way it is.

Also really a dude

In full disclosure I must admit that I am not immune to the draw of the female characters, although I believe my percentage is lower than the average. My very first female character was a Night Elf priest (how typical, right?) and my second female character is a human warrior, which I've talked about before (and need to play more). I honestly can't remember any others that I may have.

So it seems that the trends that drive men to play a female character are the oft-quoted attractiveness and their perception of in-game gender roles. What I'm particularly interested in is why there is such a difference in the percentage of crossplay between male and female players. Do women play so few male characters because female characters tend to be more attractive? What other components are there to this?

But wait, there's more - Age and crossplay
There is an age component to all of this, too. In general, older male players are more likely to play female characters than younger male players. Going back to the two groups that I set up for my post about the ages of male players and how that impacted what they played, I found that in general, the 18 and younger group played female characters 27.62% of the time while the 25 and older group played female characters 34.65% of the time. Futhermore, the increase from one group to another was not uniform, some groups saw a higher increase than others.

Crossplay by age for class
	Younger	Older	Comparison of odds*
Average	27.62%	34.65%	1.39
Priest	46.02%	47.26%	1.05
Mage	37.27%	37.24%	1.00
Paladin	35.33%	42.71%	1.36
Shaman	30.08%	32.88%	1.14
Hunter	27.27%	25.51%	0.91
Rogue	23.85%	26.84%	1.17
Druid	23.81%	39.87%	2.12
Warlock	21.11%	27.78%	1.44
Death Knight	17.65%	27.75%	1.79
Warrior	15.15%	25.48%	1.91

So every group except for the hunter and the mage saw an increase in their amount of crossplay among the male respondents at they ageds. When looking at this chart, however, some of the classes increased less than the average increase. So while female characters tend to appeal more as we move from the younger group to the older group, some don't increase as much. In summary, as male players age

• Decreased: hunter, mage
• Increased<Average: priest, shaman, rogue, paladin
• Increased>Average: warlock, Death Knight, warrior, druid

One thing to notice is that the classes that had the lowest percentage of female players among the younger group saw the biggest increases. It's distinctly possible that as male players get older, they tend to throw away a bit of their preconceived notions about in-game gender roles. This isn't to say that the older male players are an enlightened bunch, but just that they don't subscribe to those gender roles as strongly.

Crossplay by age for race
	Younger	Older	Comparison of odds*
Average	27.62%	34.65%	1.39
Draenei	58.75%	53.7%	0.81
Night Elf	47.58%	47.11%	0.98
Blood Elf	44.44%	52.02%	1.36
Human	31.28%	41.51%	1.56
Goblin	23.61%	30.43%	1.42
Gnome	22.92%	39.19%	2.17
Dwarf	18.18%	13.25%	0.69
Worgen	17.65%	30.84%	2.08
Troll	16.67%	26%	1.76
Undead	15.79%	29.27%	2.21
Orc	10.62%	9.17%	0.85
Tauren	10.48%	21.88%	2.42

 In summary, this is

• Decrease: dwarf, draenei, orc, Night Elf
• Increase<Average:Blood Elf
• Increase>Average:goblin, human, troll, worgen, gnome, undead, tauren

 One thing to notice here is that in addition to being more open to crossplay, the older male group also seems to have lost their qualms with the "monstrous" female races, with all of them except for the orc receiving significant gains in popularity. Quite frankly, I can't come up with a reason that the orc and the dwarf would have a decrease in popularity. It's puzzling to me.

I could have done the various breakdowns that I normally do but I think what we saw was pretty clear and that I would spare you all.   ;-)

Conclusion
Male crossplay is something that has many factors. In general, it seems to be affected by the attractiveness of the female model of the chosen race as well as the aesthetics of the class's armor. Futhermore, it seems to be affected by the in-game gender roles that the players seem to ascribe to their character's PVE roles.

As male players get older, things seem to change. They seem to become more willing to crossplay in general. It seems likely to me that this isn't due to an increased desire to play female characters but a loss of feeling that they have to play male characters. Furthermore, they seem to becomes more open in how they crossplay, not feeling as strong a pull to tend to those perceived in game gender roles and becoming more open to crossplaying with races that they might not find as attractive as others.

All in all, no matter how much analysis I do here, we can't conclude anything about why a particular person engages in crossplay or why they crossplay with the particular character(s) that they do. For some, it could just be about having something nice to look at. For some, it could be for roleplay purposes. For others, it can be part of their transition process as a transgendered person.

In the future, I'd like to be able to take a look at female crossplay. The fact that it is more rare makes the possibility of analyzing it all the more appealing. If I get the chance to do a study like this again in the future I will go to great steps to get a large enough number of female respondents so that I can achieve such an analysis.

Next time, I intend to look at what I'm calling "class correlations." I'll be looking at what classes tend to be played by the same person and how if one person plays one class, how likely is it that they play the other classes. Are there some classes that are much likelier to be played together than others? We'll find out.

*The comparison of odds column is calculated as follows. If p(young) is the percentage of female characters for the young group and p(old) being the same for the older group, with both being between 0 and 1, then the comparison of odds,

This is a measure of the increase in crossplay from the young group to the male group. It is the odds that a older respondent crossplays for that class divided by the odds that a younger respondent crossplays for that class.

WoW Survey Results: Age Differences

MAAATTTTHHHHH

We've already covered the topic of how the different gender's pick their characters, but what about people of different ages? The differences are more pronounced than I thought they would be. To do this part of the study, I split the male respondent base into three groups, each as close to one-third of the total as I could. The groups were those 18 and younger, those from 19 to 24, and those 25 and older. I took the young group and the older group and then I summarized and compared them. Each group consisted of over 400 respondents, with approximately the same number of respondents in each group.

Since there was a correlation between the age and gender of respondents, I separated the male and female respondents so I could analyze each independently. Unfortunately, I did not have enough female respondents to split them into groups for a similar age analysis. I really wish I did. I intend on doing another survey in the future and I relly hope that I can not only have a more robust form, but that it will get a much better spread through the community.

Average Class Representation
Class	Death Knight	Druid	Hunter	Mage	Paladin	Priest	Rogue	Shaman	Warlock	Warrior
Younger	10.95%	11.84%	10.63%	8.86%	12.08%	9.1%	8.78%	9.9%	7.25%	10.63%
Older	10.57%	10.78%	9.89%	9.89%	13.1%	9.96%	7.78%	9.96%	7.37%	10.71%
Difference	-0.38%	-1.06%	-0.74%	+1.03%	+1.02%	+.86%	-1.0%	+0.06%	+0.12%	+0.08%

The classes that increased in representation as you go from the younger respondents to the older respondents were the mage, paladin, and priest primarily with the shaman, warlock and warrior receiving minor increases. The classes that decreased in representation were the Death Knight, druid, hunter, and rogue. I personally don't see any particular trend in the data. There is a decrease in the leather and mail wearers and an increase in the cloth and plate wearers as you go from the younger to the older respondents. When I tracked the preferences of the two age groups by role, the changes were incredibly small. Then I looked at things with respect to the class's location when fighting.

Average Representation by Location
	Younger	Older
Melee	10.12%	9.69%
Mix	11.27%	11.28%
Ranged	8.96%	9.28%

Here we see a decrease in melee-only classes and an increase in ranged-only classes, with the classes that do both remaining about the same. Is it possible that young men just feel a stronger need to hit things with weapons, and that drives them towards warriors, Death Knights, and rogues? I feel that's distinctly the case. Now, the difference we're talking about here is still somewhat small, but it is there. It likely reflects an overall trend for male players that if I had enough data and could make a category for each age, would pan out.

Average Race Representation
	Blood Elf	Draenei	Dwarf	Gnome	Goblin	Human	Night Elf	Orc	Tauren	Troll	Undead	Worgen
Y	12.32%	6.44%	5.31%	3.86%	5.8%	14.41%	9.98%	9.1%	8.53%	8.21%	9.18%	6.84%
O	13.51%	7.37%	5.66%	5.05%	6.28%	14.46%	8.25%	8.19%	8.73%	6.82%	8.39%	7.3%
D	1.19	0.93	0.35	1.19	0.48	0.05	-1.73	-0.91	0.2	-1.39	-0.79	0.46

From this (crammed) chart, we can see that the blood elves, draenei, dwarves, gnomes, goblins, humans, tauren, and wrogen all increased in representation while the night elves, orcs, trolls, and undead decreased in representation.

Races Representation by Faction
Young	46.84%	53.16%
Older	48.09%	51.91%

And from this we can definitely confirm something the previous table hints at, which is that the Alliance is more popular among older players than younger players. Oddly, the Blood Elves had the most significant gain when going from younger to older respondents (tied w/ gnomes). This is very interesting given the Horde's overall decrease in popularity. Similarly, the Night Elves saw a dramatic loss in representation despite the Alliance's overall increase in popularity. Frankly, I find this odd and I'm somewhat at a loss as to why this may be. Are young men afraid of playing the less muscular blood elf? Does the night elf suddenly become "not cool" as men age? I certainly welcome guesses/perspective in the comments.

From the results presented above we can see that the age of a player (at least for male players) has an influence on how they pick and choose their characters. I unfortunately did not have enough data to do a similar study comparing different age groups of female respondents, but I hope to be able to do so in the future.

I plan on coming back to this sort of age comparison in a later post, when I talk about for which races and classes men like to play female characters. Men play far more female characters than women do male characters and we'll be looking at where they tend to do so the most.

          - Σ Δ

WoW Survey Results: Gender and Class

Last time we covered the differences in race selection by the gender of the respondents. This time, we're going to talk about the differences in class selection by the gender of the respondents. There are tons of ways to break this down, so let's get started.

Breakdown by class

Classes played by male respondents
Paladin	Druid	Warrior	DK	Shaman	Hunter	Priest	Mage	Rogue	Warlock
12.69%	11.24%	11.03%	10.27%	10.22%	9.72%	9.61%	9.10%	8.45%	7.67%

Classes played by female respondents
Druid	Priest	Hunter	Paladin	Shaman	Mage	DK	Warlock	Rogue	Warrior
15.71%	13.60%	12.48%	11.22%	10.66%	9.96%	7.15%	7.01%	6.31%	5.89%

The classes that increased in representation if you go from male to female respondents were: druid, shaman, hunter, priest, mage, and warlock. The classes that decreased in representation were, paladin, warrior, dk, and rogue.

One of the things that we want to do when we look at this is to figure out the trend. Certainly by looking at which classes decreased in popularity it would seem that women don't like being in melee as much as men do. Is that the chief difference? Or is it that women don't like wearing plate or rogues as much? I think this deserves some breakdowns.

Breakdown by roles available

Average class representation
Male respondents No Heal Heal No Tank 8.74% 9.92% Tank 10.65% 11.97%	Female respondents No Heal Heal No Tank 8.94% 12.13% Tank 6.52% 13.47%

 But what does this all mean? Both male and female respondents seem to enjoy classes that can heal as opposed to classes that can't heal. There is a clear indication that male respondents would rather have the option of tanking than to not have the option. However, with the female respondents, we see an increase from dps/healing hybrid (top right) to 3-way hybrid (bottom right) but a decrease from pure DPS (top left) to tank/dps hybrid (bottom left).

If you think about it, the tank/dps hybrids are warriors and Death Knights. They are both plate classes. SO maybe this all has to do with the aesthetics of armor types and it cascades into the roles of the class. Let's look at some more breakdowns.

Breakdown by armor type

Average Class Representation
	Cloth	Leather	Mail	Plate
Male	8.79%	9.85%	9.97%	11.33%
Female	10.42%	11.01%	11.57%	8.09%

From this chart it would appear that male players prefer heavier armor types, with cloth being far below leather and mail and plate being far above. It's a bit more complicated for female players. We can certainly say that they don't play plate-wearing characters as often as the others, but otherwise there is an increasing trend from cloth up to mail.

So what is it? Is it that female players just don't like plate, but otherwise prefer heavier armor? Let's check something else out.

Breakdown by location in battle

Average Class Representation
	Male	Female
Melee	9.92%	6.45%
Mix	8.54%	9.40%
Ranged	9.03%	10.76%

From this chart, it would appear that women tend to prefer to prefer to stand at range as opposed to melee. Male players have a much more even distribution of preferences. But there may be something else at play here. Loot at the bottom four classes for the female respondents: Death Knight, warlock, rogue, and warrior. What separates them from the others? They have a different tone than the other classes. The Death Knight is dark, filled with necromantic energy. The warlock uses fel energy; it is literally demonic. The rogue is sneaky and ruthless. The warrior is often thought of as a barbarian. They have these harsh connotations to them. Maybe that's a source of their lack of representation.

Conclusion

I've just spent an awful large amount of time trying to figure out the motivations that give us the breakdown of classes played by the female respondents to my survey. This is because when we look at the breakdown by roles, their isn't a clear explanation. There was an increase from healer/dps hybrids to 3-way hybrids but a decrease from pure dps to tank/dps hybrids. 

When looking at the decrease I saw that something else may have been at play. Both tank/dps hybrids are plate classes! But the paladin is also a plate class and has a quite favorable representation among the female respondents. Paladins can heal, warriors and Death Knights cannot. This means paladins can be at range. What happens if we bring rogues into this? They're melee only and also feature a low representation. When looking at the numbers it would seem that melee versus range seems to play a big role in the class choice of the female respondents. Lastly, when we bring another data point into the analysis, the representation of the warlock, we appears to be the classes with darker themes that feature the lowest representation. But the warlock has been unpopular this expansion in general and is receiving an overhaul in Mists of Pandaria to make is more appealing, so maybe bringing it into this analysis isn't going to help.

The problem that's at the heart of this is correlation, and it can be a big problem in statistics. If you've ever taken a statistics class, you've likely heard talk about independent random variables. When things are independent (unrelated to one another) it's easier to isolate the effect of each variable. In our case, the classes with harsh connotations tend towards melee DPS. Both of those groups tend towards plate wearers. Those groups all tend towards the having the role of tanking available. There is a relationship in how the classes are designed that obfuscates the motivations at hand here. Furthermore, I didn't collect information about specs (for reasons of it being difficult to parse the data that I would receive. I'm going to talk about all of that in a much later post.), but I did collect something else. I asked each person what their feelings were about different activities in a PVE scenario.

Difference From The Average Score by Gender
	Tanking	Healing	RDPS	MDPS
Male	-0.14	-0.17	0.3	0.01
Female	-0.54	0.2	0.62	-0.28

 For that chart I had asked everyone to rate those activities on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning that you loved participating in that activity. I split my respondents by gender and found the average score for each activity and then I took the average of those averages and subtracted it from original averages. This would let me see which activities a gender liked "more than average" and "less than average". From this, we can see that male respondents liked ranged DPS more than average and melee DPS slightly more than average. Female respondents liked healing and ranged DPS more than average and tanking and melee DPS less than average.
So maybe that's it. Maybe the female respondents just typically don't like melee DPS and tanking as much as they do healing and ranged DPS. This effect would cascade down and affect what armor types the female respondents wear, and what classes they play. 
The only real way to get a handle on the motivations for why someone plays the classes they do is to ask. So, dear readers, what classes do you play and why do you play them? Of particular interest is if you made a conscious decision to switch from one class to another.  Remember, statistics are a function of a group. They can't tell you anything about an individual. So no matter what a group does, you should never use that to suggest that a person do or not do something.

WoW Survey Results: Gender and Race

Cats are magic

How do men and women play World of Warcraft? We've all heard talk about the differences between male and female WoW players. Some of that might reflect truth, some of that may reflect enforced gender roles. But has anyone just gone out there and asked them? [Editors Note: Yes, others have. No I won't link you. -HMP]

About a year ago, shortly before patch 4.1 was released, I made a survey and tried to distribute it among several sources, but the only place where it took off was MMO-Champion. In the survey I asked players about their age, gender, their characters, and what they liked to do when playing.

This data was collected during patch late patch 4.0, and consisted only of people who frequent MMO-Champion. As such, it's hard to apply everything here directly to our current WoW population. Absolute results should be assumed to likely not apply, but comparative results should still be quite relevant. For example, I won't talk about the ratio of male to female players or the age distributions of players in my results because I have a unique subset of the WoW playing population.

Race Choices

Player/Character	Horde	Alliance
Male	51.21%	48.78%
Female	45.54%	54.46%

 From this table we can see that female respondents tend to play Alliance characters slightly more than male respondents do. This does not mean that the Alliance has more female players than male players. The only way to do that would be a comprehensive survey of WoW players or an in-game random sampling of players. I wouldn't trust asking people in-game, they'd probably be weirded out by someone whispering them and asking them their age and gender.

Races played by male players
Human	Blood Elf	Night Elf	Tauren	Undead	Orc	Draenei	Troll	Worgen	Goblin	Dwarf	Gnome
14.89%	12.41%	9.00%	8.80%	8.27%	8.10%	7.51%	7.51%	7.19%	6.11%	5.51%	4.66%

Races played by female players
Blood Elf	Draenei	Night Elf	Human	Worgen	Tauren	Troll	Goblin	Gnome	Undead	Orc	Dwarf
17.13%	14.47%	13.09%	10.86%	8.07%	7.94%	7.52%	5.85%	5.01%	3.76%	3.34%	2.92%

Humans and elves are popular all around, but the popularity/percentage of play changes drastically depending upon the gender of the respondent. In the transition from male to female the human, undead, orc and dwarf representations drastically lowers while the draenei, blood elf, and night elf representations increase dramatically. If you consider the sexual dimorphism for each of the races and the comparative attractiveness between each race's genders it would appear that a large factor in this has to do with wanting one's character to be attractive/human. The more monstrous races tend toward the lower side of the scale, while the more attractive and human ones tend toward the higher side of the scale. In the case of the draenei, the males are large and strange, while their females are more human sized and proportioned. I can't really account for the loss of representation of humans in the transition except that their popularity may pale in comparison to the elves and the draenei.

It's important to remember that people play different races for a great variety of reasons and that the reasons listed above do not apply to everybody's decision. This merely reflects the overall trend. One reason to pick a race that actually went away quite a bit in Cataclysm was race/class combinations. They were far more restrictive prior to Cataclysm and were opened up significantly and now there are far fewer restrictions than there were.

In general, you find that the distribution of races is more even among the male players, while it is more skewed among the female players. I can't really account for what this means, though. Commenters are certainly welcome to speculate.

Next time the discussion will be about the gender of the player and the classes they play. That one is going to be a doozy.

WoW Survey Results: Data Collection

A journey begins

Last April, shortly before patch 4.1 came out, I ran a survey for WoW players. It was basic information, such as their gender, age, their characters, and what they liked to do when playing. I submitted the survey to various places, but the only place that I got any information from was the MMO-Champion forums.

Now, because my information came from out-of-game resources and only 1 resource in particular, be very wary of taking things and applying them to the general World of Warcraft population. So if you see some result that says, "12% of characters played by the respondents were paladins" that doesn't mean that 12% of all characters are paladins. However, a result such as "Men tend to play warriors more often than women do" is one that could very well be applied to the general WoW population.

I had a total of 1591 respondents before I pulled the data for analysis. Out of that, 153 selected female as their gender and 1438 selected male as their gender. For the females, the average age was 24.38 years with a standard deviation of 5.89 years. For the males, the average age was 22.22 years with a standard deviation of 6.04 years.

If you went just by this, it would imply that the percentage of female WoW players is between 9% and 10%. Other studies have been done which strongly refute that claim. The likely factor here is that female WoW players just don't go to MMO-Champion as often as male WoW players do. In fact, in my other, previous study, only ~6% of the MMO-Champion respondents were female whereas other sources, such as WoW.com  (as it was known at the time) had 22% female respondents and the official World of Warcraft forums had ~19% female respondents. Other studies have shown that the percentage of females in the WoW population is 30% or higher. What we see from this is that women tend to participate in the WoW community differently than men do, and may be a good source for a future study.

This would also seem to imply that the average of a female WoW player is higher than that of a male player. Again, you can't make that distinction because women participate in the WoW community differently than men do. You can say that the average age of a female MMO-Champion forum user is higher than that of a male MMO-Champion forum user.

From my information, the 153 female players listed of total of 652 characters played, for an average of 4.26 characters per respondent. The 1438 male respondents listed a total of 5284 characters played, for an average of 3.67 characters per respondent. This doesn't mean that women necessarily play more characters than men do, but may also reflect a difference in whether they felt a character was worth listing as a character they 'played'.

Over the course of the coming weeks, I will be detailing much more information that results from this data set. There's some really great stuff to come, so stay tuned to this blog. When new info is posted, an announcement will go out on my twitter.

I really look forward to getting all of this posted.