Play Together, Stay Together? Community Cohesion and Stability in an MMO

Small-scale qualitative studies have shown group cohesion in games can be strong enough to allow groups to transfer to new settings, but this phenomenon has not been studied with a large-scale dataset to see if it is widespread or rare. Using a three-year scrape of an MMO, World of Warcraft, the guild membership and playing time of over 90,000 characters was observed for patterns indicating group cohesion or character pairings. Groups of players who play together do stay together across time and guild changes, sometimes across multiple guild changes, indicating social ties. An average of 2/3 of the characters seen both week-to-week and across four-week periods stay in the same guild, suggesting a baseline for social stability. Previously documented rupture events, although important to study, are actually rare and unrepresentative of the continual slow turnover found here.