A year ago, we mentioned that Sony Online Entertainment had opened up their EverQuest II database to researchers, allowing scientists from noted universities the ability to study the demographics of their server in an anonymous fashion. Slowly but surely, more studies are coming out that are using this information, and one of the newer studies takes an in-depth look at roleplayers.

While the study is over 40 pages long and packed with information, Raph Koster has broken down the big findings on his website -- namely the fact that hardcore RPers only make up 5% of the player population and don't care about playing on an RP server. RPers also commonly belong to minority groups of some sort, play less hours per week than the average player, and have a higher rate of turning in-game social connections into real-world connections.

It's all interesting stuff, and Raph has it broken down on his site, or you can check out the full study in Word's .doc format.

Latest EverQuest II data study covers roleplayers originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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