Fixed link : http://www.tera-online.com/content/cpe-numbers
And I might as well post the rest for the "too lazy to click" peeps.
CPE by the Numbers
April 15, 2011 5:30pm by Jon Tuite
Hi TERA fans!
My name is Jon Tuite, but some of you might remember me from the Community Play Event as Toot, the castanic slayer. I am the business intelligence analyst here at En Masse and it is my job to collect data about how people play TERA, and then use that information to help make business and design decisions. During the community event, I collected all kinds of interesting data about play trends in TERA, and BrotherMagneto asked me to put some of that data together in a blog post to share with the community.
Character Races and Classes
This graph represents the breakdown of races and classes for all characters that participated in the Community Play Event (CPE). The most popular race and class combination was the castanic warrior, which accounted for 5.7% of the total population, while the least popular was the baraka slayer, with only .3%. Overall, the most popular races were the castanic (30%), the high elf (21%), and the humans (17%). These are the most human-like races available to players, which may hint to the fact that players tend to pick races they find more attractive to look at. Since the baraka race does not have a female version, this may explain why the race is the least popular of all (7%).
If we combine the classes into roles, we get the pie chart below, which would seem to indicate that healer classes are lacking within the population. This isn’t too surprising given the brief duration of the Community Play Event; since participants could only play for three days, most folks likely chose characters better suited to exploration. This may also reflect what players view as the traditional MMO healer roles. In TERA, however, the action combat system makes playing a healing class a much different proposition. We highly encourage players to give healers a shot in the next event—the experience may pleasantly surprise you!
Consider the makeup of a balanced party, which consists of 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 damage dealers. This is equivalent to 20% tanks, 20% healers, and 60% damage dealers, which is a good mix of characters to ensure no shortage of tanks and healers—a common problem in other games. Since TERA offers a unique take on the healer role, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more healers and less DPS in future events.
Leveling
Out of the entire population of characters played during the event, 11.37% made it to the level cap of 17. Although this number seems low, it reflects many of the secondary characters, or “alts,” that were created by players but not leveled up. If we remove these characters from the dataset, we can say that 30% of all players made it to level 17. One player even managed to achieve level 17 in about 6 hours of gameplay—props to the character “Jinu” for getting it done! Additionally, 44% of players made it to at least level 10. We’d most likely see higher levels across the board if the play event was open for more than 37 hours over 3 days—people have to eat, sleep, and work, too.
Gold
Since XP and level were capped during the CPE, there was no way to progress your character after reaching the cap except to get better gear and more gold. One ambitious player took this as a challenge and ended the CPE with a character that had nearly 200,000 gold coins (well done, Defuya)!
Attack and Level
The chart below shows each character’s attack rating by the level achieved at the end of the Community Play Event. Not surprisingly, the higher your character level, the more damage your character can dish out. For any individual character level there’s a wide range of attack ratings—you can see that many of the level 17 characters don’t do much more damage than level 1 characters. Why is that? It turns out that most of the variation can be attributed to class.
What happens if we look at the character attack rating for a single class? The chart below shows the same information as the chart above, except we are now looking only at the berserker class. The deviation remains fairly small between characters until we get out of the Island of Dawn area (> level 10) and start leveling on the mainland. Once players reach the mainland they begin to find a much greater variety of gear and enchantable weapons, giving them a higher possible attack for their level. Since players were capped at level 17, the deviation is largest at that level.
Monsters
During the event, the two biggest player killers ended up being Arakia (an ovolith) and Karascha. They scored a total of 273 and 82 kills respectively. Arakia is an open-world boss found in the Valley of Titans and is much too powerful for a group of level 17s, which is why he slaughtered players so easily. Still, he was taken down successfully 9 times by some very persistent players.
Combined, players killed a total of 57,442 monsters and were killed by monsters 471 times. That means that for every 122 monsters that died, one player was killed. For every one minute the servers were online, 26 monsters were killed, and every 5 minutes, at least one noob died.
Guilds
For such a short event, guilds became very popular, very quickly. During the event, 24 guilds were created and 32% of the total population joined a guild by the end of the CPE on Sunday. Out of these guilds, the largest was TERAFans with a population of 64 characters.
The graph below shows each guild based on the average playtime and average level of the population within the guild. The size of the dot represents the size of the guild.
Gathering and Crafting
The chart below illustrates the percentage contribution, by class, of all gathering and crafting that took place in TERA during the CPE. According to the data, slayers tend to craft and gather more than any other class; perhaps fueled by their desire to wield the largest, most unproportionately sized weapon in the lands? Since slayers and archers share close to the same population (13.3% and 14.5% respectively), you might expect them to craft and gather at the same rate, but there is a huge difference between these two values. Is it a coincidence, or does this data tell us that people who choose archer as a class don’t like crafting, or that they just don’t understand how to craft a bow?
Overall, we had a great turnout for the Community Play Event, and I personally had a fantastic experience meeting players and joining in on some of the battles. Given the lively activity on the TERA forums after the event, it looks like a great many others did, too.
We’re continuing to analyze the data we gathered to help improve the TERA play experience. Your participation helps us immensely by providing real data about how you like to play the game. We’ll use this information to make changes to the game's balance, story, and mechanics so we can do our best to exceed your expectations.
If you have ideas for cool data to look at in the next event, feel free to leave a comment on this thread and I’ll do my best to include it for the next event.
Discuss this TERA Blog post on the forums!
