{"title":"Measuring cooperative gameplay pacing in World of Warcraft","authors":"Martin Ashton, Clark Verbrugge","doi":"10.1145/2159365.2159376","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":92512,"journal":{"name":"FDG : proceedings of the International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games","volume":"13 1","pages":"77-83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2011-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"16","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"FDG : proceedings of the International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2159365.2159376","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 16
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.