Guild Wars 2

I know you guys have a team that just crunches stats for you. Purely out of curiosity, how detailed are the stats do you track on players?

Do you for example know: How many times people die or do not die on JPs? Do you know if they decide to give up? Do you know how many times people die in dungeons or abandon the instance? Do you know how long it takes them? Do you know the exact gear of any given expedition? Do you know the results of skirmishes in WvW (i.e. how often a certain class using a certain build defeats another class using a certain build)? Do you know how often people evade big damage with dodges? Do you know how often people change their build or utilities? Or any other info you’d like to share?

Maybe not purely out of curiosity; knowing if you guys have specific stats on things could potentially cut out some of the over dramatic threads (“omg everyone is ____ when they use ____ and can never _”).

I doubt you’ll ever get that kind of information. I’ve never seen a game company willing to post details on their demographics because it can potentially leak information or cause undue speculation.

Calys Teneb.7015:

I doubt you’ll ever get that kind of information. I’ve never seen a game company willing to post details on their demographics because it can potentially leak information or cause undue speculation.

I doubt it as well, but they’ve already let several of those answers slip.

They have stated the do know how to track a lot of that. Not sure about all of it, but they do have tools to track a good portion of it.

Paradox.1380:

They have stated the do know how to track a lot of that. Not sure about all of it, but they do have tools to track a good portion of it.

On the first birthday they released a bunch of info (Including that the Risen Thrall was the deadliest creature in the game having killed more players than any other creature).

To expand on the person I quoted, The way the game is broken down, they can likely put a program to query/track deaths in specific regions, but maybe not specific coordinates (depends how much they actually save). Technically though, if they kept enough info, they could track nearly anything in the game to the degree of being able to re-render in inside a shell of the game as an otherwise interactive video. That’s saying that if they had the stuff in place and the desire to do so, they could remake your entire game life such that they see absolutely everything, but so with a free camera option, etc.

Doubtful they keep THAT much info, but it is a fairly sound theoretical possibility.

When the SAB came out, Josh confirmed that they track participation, which probably also includes attempts/failures.

Years ago, they did a technical demo which revealed some of their backend. Some of the information they showed included tracking of client performance to determine what areas of the game were running poorly.

ANet track alot of metrics, according to their devs. I don’t think you’re going to get anything terribly concrete but ANet remind me of Valve in their approach to metric gathering. Metrics are God at Valve. I think the same applies at ANet.

I think it’s why they’re pretty slow to push out some changes. I’m not saying they track too much data, but I think they sometimes struggle to actually use much of it or find solutions that won’t upset other, more satisfactory, figures.

Trust in Devon, all else bring data.