Where We Fish
This article analyses where players fish in the game World of Warcraft. It reveals the role of daily quests in shaping our fishing habits, demonstrates just how popular city-fishing is, and starts to reveal why we fish. This is (hopefully) the first in a series of articles that collectively examine why people fish in this massively multiplayer online game.
The map shows number of successful fishing casts (diameter of each circle), by area. Numbers are daily totals for all United States and European realms combined, based on a sample in July 2009. Click the map for a larger view.
A successful cast is one that does not catch a junk item, which might occur if the anglers’ skill is to low. There are 14 million successful casts each day, catching 16 million fish: Some casts catch more than 1 fish. In addition, there are 4.5 million unsuccessful casts (that catch a junk item). Unsuccessful casts are not shown on the map.
“Old Azeroth” refers to the continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms (the pre-expansion game). Within Northrend (the main area shown on the map), casts into coastal waters are shown separately from “inland” casts in other zones.
In each area, the total number of casts is divided into 3 parts:
- Open Water (dark blue) – Casts into bodies of open water.
- Daily-Related (gold) – Casts while trying to complete a daily fishing quest. This includes all casts while trying to complete the quest, not just those that catch a quest fish.
- Pools (light blue) – Casts into schools of fish.
Northrend is the continent hosting the current game expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. The continent is home to higher-level (more veteran) players. Expect to find most fishing activity here – and we do: There are 9.3 million daily casts in Northrend – two thirds of all successful casts.
A sixth of all casts are related to the daily quests, in spite of the fact that there is just one such quest available each day (the area varies between realms, randomly each day). The Northrend fishing quests are the most popular quests in the game – completed by over 300,000 characters each day. No, really – at least before patch 3.2 was launched, which made Heroic dungeons popular again. Anglers’ might be motivated by the additional reward. Or this might suggest a far greater need to guide players. Either way, it raises some questions, such as, why is there just one fishing quest per day in the current game expansion?
Ignoring daily quest-related fishing, the most popular single location is Dalaran’s Eventide Fountain, with 1.4 million casts per day – equivalent to 1 person on each realm fishing there for 12 hours each day. The irony is that Dalaran’s Eventide Fountain is also one of the smallest body of water in the entire game. Cities account for a third of all casts – Dalaran is not the only popular city. At least half of the “Old Azeroth (Inland)” casts are casts in the waters of major cities (such as Stormwind or Orgrimmar).
So, half of all fishing activity is either directed by quests, or occurs in cities. Training (cooking and/or fishing skills) is also an important reason to fish, although it is harder to estimate how important.
Pool fishing is normally the fastest way to catch “valuable” fish. Yet only 17% of casts are from pools. Even if we look at areas with no quests and desirable “Northrend” fish, like the Grizzly Hills, half of all casts are still in open water. This isn’t the only example that suggests that anglers really are quite lazy, and don’t want to much hassle when fishing.
The remainder of this article explores some of these issues in more detail, using information about where we fish to start to explain why we fish. It also describes the method behind the numbers, with a technical appendix containing data. Read more of this article »
Frostmourne Cavern
This movie records one of the many lore-related events in World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. It’s a vision of Arthas and Muradin Bronzebeard discovering the sword, and in doing so, changing the “world” forever. The event is part of a single-player quest in Northrend, the expansion’s new continent. Previously events like this were found at the end of dungeons so hard that most players never saw them.
The aim of the game is changing. Previously the aim for a lot of players was to get to “the end”: To obtain the highest possible level, at which point they could embark on challenging group dungeons or player-vs-player battles. But Northrend is full of reasons to play the game in the middle. Not just this. There is a lot of high quality, fun, even inventive content coming with the new expansion. From aircraft combat and mass-slaughter shoot-em ups, to peace, love and harmony: Saving baby murlocs is enough to bring a tear to the eye, which is quite an achievement for any game.
Infecting the Ad Pool
Malicious Advertising (Malvertising) is becoming a problem. This is the practice of purchasing advertising space on unsuspecting websites, then using that space to run adverts which automatically redirect the user’s browser to a malware site – a site that distributes viruses, spyware, and other computer nasties.
The practice first emerged in 2006. Already 2008 has seen may large publishers (website operators) attacked, including Classmates, USA Today, Photobucket, and MySpace.
Late last night I visited one of my own websites and got immediately redirected off to a domain already blacklisted by Google, which in turn redirected to another site that was intent on installing a scareware “virus checker”. ZAM (a gaming network), already plagued by “XP Online Scanner” adverts earlier this year, had again been hit by malicious adverts. The timing, just after midnight UTC Saturday, was impeccable: Advertising networks tend to work sensible business hours, ensuring 48 hours of infestation before anyone starts to investigate it. [Although I should add that in this case I did get a positive resolution within 24 hours.]
My response was to temporarily abandon the advertising network that had delivered the “malvert”, and switch to affiliate advertising I control.
This article explains why publishers have a very low tolerance of malverts, and consequently why it is in the best interests of advertising networks to deal with malvertising before it becomes widespread.
Valuing Users
The cost to a malware writer of placing a single malvert is in the order of $0.001, with the publisher receiving somewhat less than that. The pricing model assumes a high volume of advertising is ignored by users: An advertiser might need to screen thousands of adverts to get any referrals (click-throughs). It does not assume that the adverts will immediately refer every user to the advertiser’s site, without user interaction.
For malware writers this is both cheap and highly effective: Quantcast and Compete suggest xponlinescanner.com (a recent case of malicious advertising) attracted 1-2% of all US internet users in May: A dominance achieved by less than 500 other sites worldwide. Something advertising agencies can only dream about. Quantcast’s demographic analysis also indicates that the old, poor or poorly educated are more likely than other internet users to be caught by malware.
The publisher got a fraction of a cent, and may have lost 1 or more customers forever:
New visitors essentially bounce straight into “virus hell”. They are never coming back; not after “what you did to their computers”. Regular visitors assume your site was “hacked” (a security breach on your servers), and loose confidence. Even if they stay, they’ll think twice about typing their credit card number in again. If the site relies on viral traffic, they will be sure to tell their friends not to visit as well.
So Block the Advert!
Unless the publisher has a very strong community, they might never realise why their users are leaving: Malverts may be targeted by location or time of day, such that the publisher never sees them.
Assuming the publisher knows about the malvertising, finding the source transpires to be exceptionally hard. Malicious adverts may be embedded in an advert that looks perfectly normal, but only triggers an automatic redirect under certain circumstances. So even in simple cases, where the publisher has a direct relationship to advertisers, finding malware requires the advert to be tested.
But adverts are increasingly run via networks, who increasingly rely on advertising exchanges. So a large publisher could be running practically any advertising campaign in existence. I was running over 2,000 different campaigns (many of which have multiple adverts), and my site is small fry.
So once a malicious advert enters the system, it can spread like a virus throughout online advertising networks, almost unchecked.
Reactions
Publishers who care about their customers (and consequently also tend to have the most valuable advertising inventory) are likely to avoid any advertising network that delivers malvertising:
- They might establish direct relationships with reputable advertisers, which cuts the networks out of the loop completely. Only viable for large publishers or those in specific niches.
- Or perhaps they will change to text or non-interactive adverts? Advertisers that rely on being able to communicate using imagary will have problems: The only publishers to remain with malware-infested networks will be those that do not care about their users. Precisely the sites that were probably not good places to advertise anyway.
Users will gradually grow more paranoid. Pop-up advertising is a perfect example: Browsers gave too much control to scripts, and not enough control to the user. The result was that pop-up blocking features became commonplace, and pop-ups became a redundant technology.
What are users’ “solutions” to malvertising? Completely blocking all adverts and disabling all scripting. How does that help advertisers, networks or publishers? It doesn’t.
Sadly users’ solutions will not include disabling Flash, the poor design of which seems to be at the heart of the malicious advertising (something countered by Adobe). Flash is so critical for online video most users cannot browse the internet without it.
Solutions
There still seems to be a lack of appreciation of the damage potential of malicious advertising. But there are solutions available to the industry collectively, as many of the authors below demonstrate:
- Spyware Sucks – Sandi Hardmeier’s ‘blog documents many malvertising events and methods. Summaries can also be found at TeMerc Internet Countermeasures.
- Online advertising’s dirty secret: Malvertising – Introduction and possible solutions, from Ian Thomas.
- Malicious Ads getting More Attention — People Still Clueless – Common misunderstandings.
Map of World of Warcraft Online Communities
Michael Zenke’s MMO Blogipelago map [via Tobold], based on the famous xkcd map of online communities, inspired me to create a map for World of Warcraft (WoW) online communities. Click on the map for a larger image with links:
This article explains the logic behind the map. Read more of this article »
Another BlizzCon Costume
Blizzard’s developers spontaneously created one of the most surreal moments I’ve ever experienced in World of Warcraft. Enough to warrant a short movie:
The footage comes from part of a stress test of World of Warcraft’s new tournament realms. The stress is technical – to see how many players the server can support. Events like this keep players entertained and online. On live game servers, the costumes are only available to those that attended one specific event (BlizzCon), so it would probably be impossible to find this many players with costumes on a single live server. The large costumed avatar is the Games Master (presumably a developer), who is being followed by her new found fans…
BarCamp: Living on Virtual Fish
For those that missed my BarCamp Scotland presentation, “Living on Virtual Fish”, you can view it on SlideShare:
| View | Upload your own
The following articles loosely correlate to each of the talk’s sections, and provide more depth and explanation:
- Learn2Play, the new Real Money Trading?
- Adventures in Online Advertising
- Thoughts on a Socio-Economic Environment based on Nothing
Adventures in Online Advertising
This article summarises what I have learnt from introduction of advertising onto El’s Extreme Anglin’, a guide to fishing in the World of Warcraft (WoW). It introduces internet advertising with discussion of the earning potential, cashflow and ethics. The article then provides a series of case studies on specific topics, such as iteratively improving revenue, altering placement, cloaking, use of text or image adverts, and seasonal variations over Christmas. It should offer a useful introduction for those attempting to monetarise medium-sized websites.
