Applied MMORPG Stats

For those who like both applied statistics (!) and massive multiplayer games (!!), there's a new site called PlayOn, authored by folks at the Palo Alto Research Center [Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Robert Moore, and Eric Nickell]. All together, this team is wicked hardcore -- everyone has at least a PhD, and there's a nice interdisciplinary blend of computer science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Given their unique focus on MMORPG quantitative analysis, I'm really excited in what discoveries this team will make in the following months.

Just to throw my two cents in, I'm really impressed at PlayOn's discovery on how to cull census data from World of Warcraft -- so far, they've focused on longitudinal analysis stratified by player level and class, but I can't wait until they start doing time-series analysis using, say, ARMA/ARIMA models and bust out bootstrap/jackknife routines and splines (^_^)

Anyway, it's definitely worth a look, if only to confirm that warlocks are statistically more lonely than priests.