I'll assume they blanked the character names...

[Venkman]

Scientists sift through 60tb of data on EQ2, straight from SOE.

The article is pretty sparse. I kept expecting the above link to be a page 2. But regardless, I did see some interesting things in there that substantiate stuff we've discussed over the years. For starts, this quote stuck out for me:

To give a concrete example of the data's utility, [Jaideep] Srivastava described how he could explore the phenomenon of customer churn, something that's significant for any sort of subscription-based service, like cell phones or cable TV. With the full dataset, the team can now track how individual customers dropping out of the game influenced others who they typically played or interacted with. Using this data, the spreading rate and influence factor could then be calculated, providing hard measures to work with.

Other things:

• People who lived within 10km of each other were more likely to interact than those in different timezones.
• When it is discovered that people are different genders, they are less likely to interact. And the rate goes down further when it's women talking to women (maybe because one doesn't believe the other?).
• Average age of players was 31. This makes sense for an EQ title as that population is aging. We're not talking about a title with 12-80 appeal.
• Body mass index better than the US average (what the heck else does SOE know about it's players?! ... kidding, probably self-reported info). But players were more depressed than average.
  
• The smaller subset of roleplayers had it worse. Particularly non-heterosexuals and ethnic or religious minorities.

Also telling:

But he argues that this isn't just about researchers losing out. "There are a lot of things we can show them about their bottom line, but these industries are deadline focused," [Dimitri] Williams said. "They're not far enough beyond the garage-shop mentality."

[Lantyssa]

That is interesting.  I'd love to see more specifics.

[Segoris]

This article is definitely interesting. Regarding the quote below, that in itself is worthy of an entire study itself, I think, especially if including female to female social interactions outside of MMOs. On a couple other forums there was discussion on how that is just generally true due to, according to the female players views as well as male players thinking, wanting to avoid drama that comes with certain types of females. There were a few that mentioned how they don't want to be associated with other female gamers because this may hurt credibility by having people look at them as just another girl, when they wanted nothing more but to be looked at as a gamer who can get the job done.

• When it is discovered that people are different genders, they are less likely to interact. And the rate goes down further when it's women talking to women (maybe because one doesn't believe the other?).

I'd absolutely love to see a lot major MMOs get involved in this study so we can see, and compare, how people are in other genre's as well as with games that are attracting newer gamers more so then EQ2.

[Lietgardis]

They started talking about their findings last year.  Here's the first paper.

[Sky]

Contractor described the results of running these tests on a week's worth of data from a server that saw over 3,000 North American players during that span. In that week, his team could detect over 2,000 players that became involved in partner relationships and about 2,500 who took part in trade interactions. But distance had a much larger effect; players within 10 kilometers of each other were five times more likely to interact.  

So solo players accounted for 1/3 or the playerbase. I'd be interested to know if the data can sift out multi-boxes or if that counts as partnership? I'm getting closer to 'current' content, in Kunark and the sheer amount of multiboxing was eye-opening. I'd say the majority of players I came across last night were at least dual-box, with one six-box that was annoying the fuck out of me. I only saw two single characters, one was afk and the other was harvesting. That might account for the geographic data. Also, the people I played with most online are people I actually know offline.

Definitely some interesting stuff, I'd like to see more results.