World of Warcraft Research

"Austin GDC 2009: Frank Pearce explains what it takes to craft 7,650 quests, 70,000 spells, 40,000 NPCs, 1.5 million assets, and 5.5 million lines of code; some 4,000 employees, 13,250 server blades, and 75,000 CPU cores keep MMORPG running."

"Executive vice-president of product development Frank Pearce talks WoW 2, StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3."

"Blizzard can also be publicity shy at times - which is why Gamasutra was fortunate to catch up with Senior Vice President Frank Pearce, one of the three founders of the original Blizzard (then called Silicon & Synapse) in 1991."

"World of Warcraft Lead Designer Jeffrey Kaplan talks to us today about the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion in this new WarCry Q&A. Jason Rice finds out about raids, story, reputation and more."

"We quiz Producer Mark Kern to learn the very latest on Blizzard's persistent state title, its biggest project ever."

"When interviewing and talking with Production Director J. Allen Brack about the upcoming additions to World of Warcraft there were a lot of ideas that look great for the game. The MMO market is changing and WoW is set to change with it."

"Last week, during the midnight launch of the "World of Warcraft" expansion "Wrath of the Lich King," I spoke with Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. We talked about the business model of Blizzard and "World of Warcraft," and what we can expect next."

"On Tuesday, Blizzard Entertainment, a leading game developer, hopes to reverse that trend as it plans to announces a deal with Legendary Pictures, a major Warner Brothers affiliate, to make a big-budget "Lord of the Rings"-style live-action film based on Blizzard's wildly popular Warcraft series."

"No one at Blizzard ever expected World of Warcraft to become the phenomenon it has, according to Bill Roper.\n\nI remember a meeting at Blizzard where we were hoping we'd be able to sell a million copies of the game", Roper, former Blizzard North employee and now Flagship Studios CEO, has told CVG in an interview."

"During the past year, nearly 16,000 people have downloaded a 40-page economic analysis of EverQuest, Sony's popular online fantasy world of Norrath. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," by California State Fullerton economics professor Edward Castronova, is the No. 1 article in the history of the Economics Research Network, an Internet library of tens of thousands of professional journals and research papers in economics."

"It's not going to be news to anyone who follows this page, but World of Warcraft has of course already spawned an active external market. What's different is that Blizzard, the developer, has announced [text below] that it will attempt to shut the thing down."

"I've spent much of the last year collecting and helping to analyze data scraped from World of Warcraft as part of the largest quantitative study of virtual worlds to date."

"Massively multiplayer online worlds (e.g., EverQuest or SecondLife) constitute a new form of social life that is ripe for social scientific study. Inhabitants of persistent virtual environments spend on average more than twenty hours per week logged on."

"China has announced new rules that prevent "virtual currencies" like Linden Dollars and QQ coins from being traded for real cash."

"Kellen's auction is just one example of how increasingly popular online role-playing games have created a shadow economy in which the lines between the real world and the virtual world are getting blurred. More than 20 million people play these games worldwide, according to Edward Castronova, an economics professor at Indiana University who has written a book on the subject, and he thinks such gamers spend more than $200 million a year on virtual goods. One site, GameUSD.com, even tracks the latest value of computer-game currency against the U.S. dollar, an exchange-rate calculator for the virtual world."

"As the popularity and sophistication of MMORPGs has skyrocketed, enterprising gamers have found ways to make real money playing them--to the point where experts say that it has become common to run across gamers who make their entire income with virtual jobs."

"WoW matters because it creates a powerful platform for learning, without a training program in sight. Many of the approaches used by WoW could be very helpful to business executives as they strive to improve performance more rapidly in their own organizations."

"For the past 8 months, we have been collecting and analyzing data from WoW. We use "bots" on 5 different servers (covering PvP, PvE and RP realms) and take snapshots of the population every 10 minutes or so (more detail here), capturing data about each present character's level, location, grouped status, and guild affiliation (among other things). So far, we have observed about 150,000 unique characters. While this data is far from perfect (after all, we are only getting what Blizzard is willing to let transpire through their API), it can still yield a surprising amount of insight into the social dimensions of multiplayer games."

The National Science Foundation has given UC Irvine $100,000 to figure out why Americans go to greater lengths than the Chinese to modify "World of Warcraft," the hugely popular multiplayer online game produced by Blizzard Entertainment of Irvine.

A researcher at University of California at Irvine got $100,000 from the National Science Foundation to study how Americans play the popular online game World of Warcraft