Research! Call for help.

Hi Cabal,

I'm a game studies academic. I do research on games: aesthetics, history, the industry, design.

I've been playing TSW for a while, thinking about how to develop a research question. I think I've come up with one. I will need help.

I want to study raids, dungeons and other coordinated group activity: the more difficult ones, the ones which require preparation, organization and communication. I want to capture all the data during the raid that I possibly can: all chat transcriptions, a voice transcription from TeamSpeak, video capture, input/keystroke capture, perhaps even eye-tracking.

Would there be enough of you interested in participating to record an entire raid? We'd need to figure out how to install the capture software on your systems. As long as there is consistency on resolution, framerate and timecoding, it doesn't matter what video capture is used.

Willa is going to be helping me: I'm in the UK, she's in California, so between us we can offer some support in preparing to record the raid.

How much funding I can get to support the research is up in the air. At the outset, it's mostly about proof-of-concept. I hope to get support from various channels. If I do get support, I'll be able to sustain a study that goes over a period of time. For now, if we can even record one raid, that would be a start.

I'm open to suggestions about what raid or dungeon would be the most appropriate. I think the important thing is that it not be easy: that there's a high risk of failure.

P.S. I'm not a psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist - I'm not studying us players as subjects, but rather gameplay aesthetics, human-software interaction and communication dynamics. Still, I'll need to go through an ethics process at some point.

Also, if there are any other significant channels of planning and preparation for a given raid/dungeon - i.e., how do you learn what you need to know - I'd be grateful if you could share that with me.

Many thanks if you can help!

I'm the mentioned above Willa.

I know, the username didn't give it away at all.

Excited to work and play with you all for this!

Well I can probably help, but if you want to study hard content, TSW is not the best place. All content in TSW is casual by any endgame standards, and while mediocre teams struggle, good teams literally demolish it. Hard content is also unpopular, as most players prefer to do easiest version available. I understand that you are in a process of defining a research question, but having a vague idea of what you wish to get out of it would be helpful. As you wish to look at hard group content, there is really no way to this without actually studying the players, as in difference in performance of teams is because of their members.

Eye tracking: this will depend completely on UI layout and what addons a player uses. Raiding with default UI will significantly impair my ability to preform as needed information is poorly placed and hard to see, be that about casts, buffs or rotation.

Communications: 1 person calling out actions help team progress fastest as it cuts out unnecessary decision making. This is nearly impossible though chat, so encounters are designed assuming 3rd party tools like TS used. Communications can be replaced by experience.

Preparation: improves rate of success, preparation mean reading/watching a guide for encounter if available. Having your build and rotation down, having stocked up on consumables. Poor DPS performance extends the encounter, significantly reducing chance of success in longer fights. Tanks and healers, poor performance is wipe.

As far as encounter design goes, it's popularity is down to risk/reward ratio compared to other options. Everything else little significant impact

Thanks for the feedback!

Definitely want all participants to play as close as possible to the way they play usually, including UI mods. Eye tracking (if we use it - will rely more on funding support than any other factor, would be latter phase) is overlayed against video capture and then each composite is analyzed using open computer vision tools. I haven't checked yet on what tools exist for recording all TeamSpeak activity on a server, but would want to do that. Chat transcriptions are for completeness, but could be mined from video transcriptions as well.

My not-being-a-psychologist frees me from being too granular with my research question, fortunately. I'm definitely not trying to isolate variables: I'm looking for the game aesthetics version of "cognition in the wild." It doesn't need to be the most difficult of MMOs for this to work: it has to represent a challenge that is surmounted by planning, communication in real time, and organization, and there has to be a real possibility of failure.

For me, what I'm trying to figure out is the best way to load all game capture software needed without introducing so much system lag on the client that it changes the player experience substantially. That may be impossible in the first iteration.

Well, the nightmare raids are really hard atm. And 2 of them probably impossible until we start beating the 1st one.

Guido says that NY is beat, but you have to poke him for details. From my understanding NM raids are hard because they are gear gated rather than having mechanics which require superior skills.

As far as capturing, a simple video capture will give you both TS and chat transcripts. OBS can be used for that and at least on my system has little noticeable change in performance. Combat log parsed in ACT will give you any needed information about the fight. The only thing you will not get with absolute minimum effort is eye tracking. Individual preparation would require a simple survey, either for each run or just one asking participant to estimate her/his general preparation level.

I think that chat is also logged in a file, but do not quote me on that, at the very least you can type it out from video. Now I have to go and look up what "cognition in the wild" is 😀

AFAIK no one has even come close to beat it. Whispers of Mutiny and Lagspike are probably the Cabals who have done more progress on it, although there are a few others who are doing progress as well.

And in a way required gear and "superior skills" are correlated. At some point content becomes trivial with enough gear, below that point you need more skill in order to overcome the statistical difficulties. There are also a few more, and harder mechanics, in NY NM. At the moment our biggest challenge seems to be that people are dying 1 by 1, to the mechanics in 3rd phase, not the statistical challenge (healing/mitigation needed, DPS races, etc).

I just realized that one of my concerns is a non-concern: TS3 supports recording right in the client. Straightforward to add an observer account to capture all the voice discussion. If they tag the voice recording with the name of each speaker at that moment - then Robert's our mother's brother.

Combat log parsing is exactly one of the things I want to capture, along with APM and communications - both pre-raid and post-raid. I'll Google ACT and OBS, but if you could tell me more about them, I'd be helpful.

First step is a personal one: to go deeper into the mechanics and understand them enough on a personal level, to stitch together the raw data collected with the dynamics of play.

The eye tracking may be the 2.0 version of the research.

I'm really looking forward to this.

Oh, that OBS! That makes things easier - the eye tracking tool I'm testing and evaluating plugs into OBS.

Not really as without required gear you can't participate in content no matter skill, but I agree that making it through in bare minimum takes more skill than skipping all mechanics due to over gearing. But I will hold my judgement about NM raids for now until I can do them.

Or just have TS overlay in OBS which will record both what's being said, show by who and at same time as action is happening.

I would happily offer you a spot on Team Green NYR if you wanted it - but you're looking for hard content, and Elite NYr certainly does not qualify these days as hard content. Given the raids we run, I guess that means you're looking at Grumpy Kiboko's Flappy raids.

'Cognition in the wild' is what I would call 'Cultural Anthropology', and the people where I work (I teach Game Design, so hi fellow Game studies colleague!) would call 'Design Research' and Bruno Latour once ostentatiously named 'Actor-Network Theory' - ie, that process of studying what people actually do, not just what they say they do (or what they do in a laboratory setting).

Another research option, by the way, would be to have people stream their raids, and record the streams - some of my students use recordings of their streams for research purposes.

Thanks Hatherley! I think that I will go down the stream + ACT route but also record TS activity.

The Latour/Law angle is accurate, and I studied with Ed Hutchins in grad school. But I'm not an anthropologist per se: I do software studies from an aesthetic theory/art historical perspective.

I tried to private-message you for more games research/game studies chat (I suspect we know each other IRL; did you submit something for DiGRA/FDG 2016?) but for some reason, the forum software doesn't let me send messages or emails.

Maybe best way to chat is to add me on Steam: whuber.

I would like to join Team Green NYR if I'm prepared for it in game terms - if nothing else, I need to be both literate about and reasonably competent at end game activities - but I am probably not going to actually participate in most of the raids for which I go full-on with data collection: just watching streams as they come in.

Odd.. there should be no restrictions, your inbox is not full by chance?

Nope. Messages that i address to others instead seem to just bounce to me. I can try to send you something now...

No, it didn't seem to work. I have 3 messages stuck in my Outbox now.

They are in outbox until read by recipient, misleading label rather than not working

one potential pitfall to be aware of regarding OBS would be each individual's upload capacity. When I tried streaming in the past (moved house, so different connection), I couldn't do HD streaming because my upload speed was so bad. If you want to capture streams from everyone in the raid, it might be a factor worth checking. People who had low upload speeds should still be able to record to file just fine, but it's something to keep in mind.

Can OBS broadcast to a LAN system? E.g., if we distributed a Raspberry Pi-based system for each raid participant with low upload bandwidth to grab streams (to avoid the overhead of disk writing on the local system) would that work?

OBS can broadcast to anything I believe, however if the system is so bad that writing overhead is a problem then it will likely have problems streaming altogether.

Your research sounds awesome. As a gamer and recovering academic who now works in psychology myself, I'm pumped to support your project however I/we can. However! I am one of the people who is now participating in NYR, and I'm pretty sure my connection pats itself on the back when it's able to do Teamspeak and TSW at the same time, never mind any other programs. I do seem to recall having some sort of recording software on my computer tho, that could record on my system and then create a file to send out later. Maybe that could be an option for those of us with dodgy connections?

Thanks all. I'll try different configurations here with OGS and then see what might be the best suite of recording tools to deploy. MsMort, do you recall the name of your software? If OGS can stream to a local file, that may be the best alternative. Well, outside of buying a new Alienware system for everyone, but that's probably not realistic. 🙂

To be honest Alienware system will not solve upload speed problems. I run very mediocre rig and have no problems with running the game, and OBS to both stream and record to local disk at same time. Granted I have an SSD.

Amusingly I was actually using an Alienware rig when I had the crappy connection ^^
You do not need an SSD to run OBS and record the fight to a file. I used to do it before I got my SSD.
Tbh, unless your rig is scraping the bottom of the minimum specs required for TSW, you'll be able to record to file. The only thing which really makes a difference is when you're trying to stream live.