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Measuring cooperative gameplay pacing in World of Warcraft

Published: 29 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Designing video game scenarios that will stimulate the player with an engaging and properly paced level of difficulty is a non-trivial issue, one which can fundamentally impact the playability and popularity of a game. World of Warcraft, like many MMORPGs, suffers noticeably from the less challenging pacing of its later-game scenarios compared to its earlier-game content. To examine this observation in detail, a World of Warcraft client-side plugin was created to record data about the players' progress throughout a cooperative scenario, including health, power, map position, class, and role. This data was analyzed to measure the pacing of each session. The results showed a drop in difficulty between late-game level 80 five-person group content and level 70 five-person group content. Using this basic metric to quantify the level of difficulty is a step forward in designing scalable and adaptable scenarios that can continue to challenge players of all experience levels.

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  • (2024)Interactive Player Journeys: Co-designing a Process Visualization System to Video Game AnalyticsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3649921.3650000(1-11)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
  • (2024)"Ah! I see" - Facilitating Process Reflection in Gameplay through a Novel Spatio-Temporal Visualization SystemProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642484(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)“Draw Fast, Guess Slow”: Characterizing Interactions in Cooperative Partially Observable Settings with Online Pictionary as a Case StudyHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 202310.1007/978-3-031-42286-7_16(283-303)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '11: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games
June 2011
356 pages
ISBN:9781450308045
DOI:10.1145/2159365
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • SASDG: Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 June 2011

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Author Tags

  1. World of Warcraft
  2. computer games
  3. social games
  4. tools

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  • Research-article

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FDG'11
Sponsor:
  • SASDG
FDG'11: Foundations of Digital Games
June 29 - July 1, 2011
Bordeaux, France

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FDG '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 107 submissions, 29%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Interactive Player Journeys: Co-designing a Process Visualization System to Video Game AnalyticsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3649921.3650000(1-11)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
  • (2024)"Ah! I see" - Facilitating Process Reflection in Gameplay through a Novel Spatio-Temporal Visualization SystemProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642484(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)“Draw Fast, Guess Slow”: Characterizing Interactions in Cooperative Partially Observable Settings with Online Pictionary as a Case StudyHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 202310.1007/978-3-031-42286-7_16(283-303)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2023
  • (2022)A Conservative Metric of Power CreepGames and Culture10.1177/1555412021105081217:5(721-751)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2022
  • (2020)Understanding Player Patterns by Combining Knowledge-Based Data Abstraction with Interactive VisualizationProceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3410404.3414257(254-266)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2020
  • (2014)A user study of different gameplay visualizationsProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2556288.2557317(361-370)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2014
  • (2014)Technical SectionComputers and Graphics10.1016/j.cag.2013.11.01038(341-356)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2014
  • (2013)A large-scale, longitudinal study of user profiles in world of warcraftProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2487788.2488146(1175-1184)Online publication date: 13-May-2013

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