Analyzing the evolution of social groups in world of warcraft

This paper investigates the evolution of social structures in the game WORLD OF WARCRAFT . We analyze 192 million recordings of 18 million characters belonging to 1.4 million teams, spanning a period of 4 years. Using a recent matrix factorization method, we extract lower dimensional data embeddings. The embeddings provide intuitively nterpretable categorizations and we find a tendency towards guilds comprised of casual gamers. To our knowledge, this is the first study considering such a vast amount of data for analyzing groups in MMORPGs.