My daughter was telling me of an error that occurred in WoW. There was a poison bug where a player left a dungeon and it didn't go away. Apparently there was a pandemic of sorts and whole cities and maps were getting affected. I was told that the CDC actually did a study of the incident to see how people reacted to it. Don't know how true the CDC part is, but i am sure if they did study it they got some intriguing data.

I hear people going on and on about how good the quests are in this game...but I disagree. I click through them as fast as possible because 90% are not engaging and poorly written. If you want good quests, go play The Witcher series. THOSE are well written, engaging quests where your choices have consequences. Here in ESO you are called a hero or equivalent even if you consistently make the most evil choice you have available to you. I guess I grew up at a time when to actually get a fantasy book published it actually had to have a well written story.

The point is, choices in this game have no consequences like they would in the real world, as such, any sociological information gathered from it is garbage.

Point in case: Kill a NPC here...then 20 minutes later law enforcement has forgotten about it...or you can bribe your way out of it...much less likely to happen in the real world.

jmrathbun wrote: »

It would also generate a data trove that could be of interest to sociological researchers. Their attention to ESO in this regard would lead to ESO being cited in scholarly publications and occasional human or scientific interest news reports. Everybody wins!

Nobody wins when you use uncorroborated data.

Statistical collection in ESO would be considered unscientific. There are too many variables, the results couldn't be accurately retested under the same conditions, and there is little if any long-term impact of any 'red' choice in the game. Stanley Milgram experiment, it is certainly not.

I think Elsevier Entertainment Computing is the only digital entertainment journal that claims to be peer-reviewed. And even it's not very good. It has a CiteScore of 2.04.

Data means little without context. 3 million characters run a quest, but how do you know which characters were role-playing? Choosing something different from the last time they did a quest? Just clicking through as fast as possible? It's not the kind of thing good research is based on.

And if you tried research based on something like zone chat you would run into serious issues with review boards, since it would be difficult to get consent from so many people.

Edit: Also, why would ZOS care about being cited? Most research papers are read by maybe fifty people in a year, ime, and I've never heard that Second Life or WoW got a popularity boost from the research done on their players.

OC_Justice wrote: »

My daughter was telling me of an error that occurred in WoW. There was a poison bug where a player left a dungeon and it didn't go away. Apparently there was a pandemic of sorts and whole cities and maps were getting affected. I was told that the CDC actually did a study of the incident to see how people reacted to it. Don't know how true the CDC part is, but i am sure if they did study it they got some intriguing data.

It was called "Corrupted Blood". I didn't play WoW but this bug was very interesting. Some players were healing and helping infected ones, and some fled to the wildeness and avoid any contact with others. this is how post-apocalyptic online games should look like!