Hail!
My day job involves an awful lot of data analytics these days and it got me wondering if it has become common practice for MMO companies to employ data scientists to their team. It seems like the potential to really know what is happening in the world and monitor for patterns could be critical to long term success. Just a quick brain dump of interesting metrics I'd be monitoring:
- Life span (spawn to death or depawn) of mobs (by zones and level)
- Combat time (combat start to end) of mobs
- Zone population (levels, lengths of stay, amount of moment, etc)
- Items selling to vendors (frequency, value, etc)
- Item (age, frequency in world, levels kept, age with player)
- Items changing player hands (frequency, what was received in return)
Building and visualing all the interesting data Easily could occupy a full time person. It seems like there would be a lot of value in being able to monitor world health and determine if expected behaviour from various mechanics, especially as changes are made in Alpha and Beta, play out in the data...
Anyone have any industry insight?
Nice one! Maybe you should post this in the we're hiring section ;)
Aside of that, i think this is valuable information for the designers to be able to tweak the game and get the expected results. For players it takes away a certain 'profession' so on that bit i don't think its good to do this.
Analytics has long been a thing in gaming.
Last game I worked on, where we had moneztization, we collected endless amount of data from players playing and dumped it into a massive data warehouse. At one point we were grabbing a billion records a day.
And now you have these people that call themselves data scientists involved.
Any game worth it's salt these days will be logging extensive amounts of information. It's one of the only ways to identify real issues in your design, not to mention see how your monetization schemes are working, or failing.
Thanks @zewtastic for confirming my suspicions. Perhaps the newsletter gods will take note and work in a piece for how VR is using (or planning to use) game data as they work through Project Faerthale. It is my experience that it's best to develop your analytics and visualizations alongside your code.
Also, to be clear, I didn't mean to imply that player-base should have access to this data though i suppose there could be some limited exceptions where it could be fun without harming gameplay.