1. Virtual Community Styles Preferred by MMORPG Players By Adam Black

2. Intro & Relevance MMORPGs are popular Have become part of pop culture No longer limited to just super-nerds Different types of communities cater to different types of players Wikis Databases Forums

3. Research Purpose Purpose: To determine which styles of virtual communities are preferred by MMORPG players Secondary Goal: Discuss and theorize reasoning behind community choices

4. Research Question Which styles of virtual communities are preferred by MMORPG players?

5. Critical Results Overwhelming neutral sentiment towards all sites tested

6. Critical Results Continued Much more talk about and traffic to the database WoWHead than to either the WoW-related wiki or forum chosen

7. Critical Results Continued Positive correlation between the percent share of unique voices for a WoW-related virtual community and its total traffic

8. Critical Results Continued FFXI data thrown out Game determined to be too old and unpopular Too little current data available 31, compared to 4,187 on wowhead.com

9. Importance of Results Useful information for community developers Design most-appealing communities for MMORPG players More visitors = more ad revenue

10. Conclusion Majority of WoW players just want to quickly find data about a specific subject Therefore, database