Some People Really Like Their MASS EFFECT 2
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Sep 8 2010, 9:09 AM
BioWare exec Casey Hudson recently shared with IGN some fascinating data that the company collected from MASS EFFECT 2 players since the game was released earlier this year.
All I can say for sure is that some people really, really like this game. 23-28 times more than your typical player.
Hudson said that this foray into user data mining is a first for the company, which harvested the statistics anonymously and assures players that no private information is associated with the data. Hudson went into further detail about the reasoning behind the stats:
"The only data that we get are in terms of events -- little things that happen in the game... Let's say if we want to know whether players skip lines of dialogue, we can have that become a little event that gets sent up. It's all completely anonymous, so all we get is raw numbers for how many times these kinds of events occur. Then we can start getting ratios and comparing proportions and things like that. It becomes this mass of numbers, and then we have to try to figure out how we would interpret that."
BioWare hopes to use this set of statistics as well as future data to aid in the design of games.
"Sometimes you'll design something and think that it's going to be used in a certain way and people will use it in a completely different way. And if you didn't know that, then you would just keep making that system the same as you did before. But once you know what players like and what they don't like, based on the way that they're playing it, then you can make more of the good stuff and less of the stuff they weren't interested in.
Ultimately it doesn't always give you the answers, but it sometimes raises questions or gets you to ask the right questions…More people played the soldier class than all of the other classes combined. If you know that, then you can start thinking about future games. Is that good? Is that a problem? Should we look at the other classes and start thinking about ways to make them selected as often as soldier? As part of asking these questions, we can design games in the future a lot better."
BioWare exec Casey Hudson recently shared with IGN some fascinating data that the company collected from MASS EFFECT 2 players since the game was released earlier this year.
All I can say for sure is that some people really, really like this game. 23-28 times more than your typical player.
Hudson said that this foray into user data mining is a first for the company, which harvested the statistics anonymously and assures players that no private information is associated with the data. Hudson went into further detail about the reasoning behind the stats:
"The only data that we get are in terms of events -- little things that happen in the game... Let's say if we want to know whether players skip lines of dialogue, we can have that become a little event that gets sent up. It's all completely anonymous, so all we get is raw numbers for how many times these kinds of events occur. Then we can start getting ratios and comparing proportions and things like that. It becomes this mass of numbers, and then we have to try to figure out how we would interpret that."
BioWare hopes to use this set of statistics as well as future data to aid in the design of games.
"Sometimes you'll design something and think that it's going to be used in a certain way and people will use it in a completely different way. And if you didn't know that, then you would just keep making that system the same as you did before. But once you know what players like and what they don't like, based on the way that they're playing it, then you can make more of the good stuff and less of the stuff they weren't interested in.
Ultimately it doesn't always give you the answers, but it sometimes raises questions or gets you to ask the right questions…More people played the soldier class than all of the other classes combined. If you know that, then you can start thinking about future games. Is that good? Is that a problem? Should we look at the other classes and start thinking about ways to make them selected as often as soldier? As part of asking these questions, we can design games in the future a lot better."
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