Under CopyrightThurau, ChristianChristianThurauBauckhage, ChristianChristianBauckhage2022-03-1123.9.20102010https://publica.fraunhofer.de/handle/publica/36699610.24406/publica-r-36699610.1109/ITW.2010.5593358This 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.en005006629conference paper