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 interpretable 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.