WoW Research

[WoWUIStudy]

Hello,

I am conducting an academic research study with the University of Regina regarding World of Warcraft user interface modifications. Your participation in this study would be greatly appreciated and would involve nothing more than the completion of a brief survey.

This study will look primarily at the World of Warcraft video game and the effect that user-created interfaces have had on WoW and its community. The survey will explore why users like you modify the interface, what benefits and drawbacks are present in user-created interface content, and why players donate their time to the community.

Participation is open to anyone who has played World of Warcraft, regardless of computer expertise, age, or anything else. If you are under the age of 18, please get your parent's or guardian's permission first.

The survey will be available at: https://survey.cs.uregina.ca/survey.php?sid=31 from now until July 15, 2011.

If you have any questions or concerns you can contact the respective researchers by email at targsean at uregina dot ca and verlysdv at uregina dot ca. Please let me know if you have any problems with the link above.

This project has been approved on ethical grounds by the University of Regina Research Ethics Board. Any questions regarding your rights as a participant may be addressed to the committee at (306) 585-4775 or research dot ethics at uregina dot ca. Non-Residents of Regina may call collect.


Thanks for your time!

[Dridzt]

I took the survey but I have to say some of the introductory/general information sections are very poorly thought out.

13-17; it either assumes you have played all classes sufficiently to make judgement (quite unlikely for the majority),
or some questions make absolutely no sense.
Q: "The class you play the least" (single selection)
A: "Erm, I don't play x,y,z at all"

If it was meant to somehow capture main/alts relations it fails

18-19 are also badly worded.
For most WoW players solo/group/raid follows the game distinction of content to solo/5man/raid.
Survey goes and arbitrarily separates them by group size instead of content: solo / less than 20 (this would cover both parties and 10man raids) / more than 20.

[tinyu]

i took the survey but i BSed that parts that i thought were not relevant to mods.

[Othgar]

hmmm the survey looks like it was written up by some one that hasn't played much. They want concrete answers to questions that don't have them.

[WoWUIStudy]

Originally Posted by Dridzt I took the survey but I have to say some of the introductory/general information sections are very poorly thought out. 13-17; it either assumes you have played all classes sufficiently to make judgement (quite unlikely for the majority), or some questions make absolutely no sense. Q: "The class you play the least" (single selection) A: "Erm, I don't play x,y,z at all" If it was meant to somehow capture main/alts relations it fails 18-19 are also badly worded. For most WoW players solo/group/raid follows the game distinction of content to solo/5man/raid. Survey goes and arbitrarily separates them by group size instead of content: solo / less than 20 (this would cover both parties and 10man raids) / more than 20.

That is some excellent feedback, thank you. I don't feel it is necessary that participants have extensive knowledge of all the classes to provide their meaningful opinions of the hardest, easiest and most favourable classes.
However, in retrospect, #17 is probably less meaningful, as you suggested.

Originally, those questions were more likert scale oriented with ratings of 0-100% of your time spent playing classes/game types and involved ranking your top 3 and least favourite 3 classes to play. Collecting this kind of data became somewhat messy and I felt made the survey look more complicated and intimidating than it needed to be.

Originally Posted by Othgar hmmm the survey looks like it was written up by some one that hasn't played much. They want concrete answers to questions that don't have them.

I have adapted the survey from a previous one found here:
https://survey.cs.uregina.ca/survey.php?sid=28

The purpose of my study is to collect newer information to compare with the previous study (from 2006).

A lot of the questions were re-worked according to participant feedback during the previous study as well as according to guidance from the previous researcher. Many of the text-based-answer questions were removed or reworked as multiple choice questions in the hopes that the survey would be cleaner and faster for participants to get through (thus increasing the number of responses to each question, none of which are mandatory).

I know there are a lot of possible abstract answers, but for the purposes of this study, it is helpful to go with one of the multiple choice answers that feels the "most true" in comparison to the others.

I am not a WoW player myself, but the previous researcher is. In any case, I am unable to change the questions while the survey is running, because the data collected so far would be deleted. However, your feedback is greatly appreciated and will be of use to future researchers.

[Ketho]

Originally Posted by WoWUIStudy I am not a WoW player myself, but the previous researcher is.

In my opinion you can't do proper research on a subject,
if you don't even have a basic understanding of the game itself

You could at least grab a trial character to do some "research"