Is there any public in-game data mining/knowledge discovery repository?

Question

I'm taking an Introduction to Data Mining course at the university and we have to work on a final project.

As you may already know, it's difficult to collect this kind of data manually (specially when you're not working for a company of have the proper contacts).

Is there any public collection of in-game data in order to apply data mining algorithms? The kind of data I'm looking for is the sort of data they used in this paper "Predicting Player Behavior in Tomb Raider Underworld".

Characteristics: playing time, number of deaths, causes of death, rewards, treasures. Other kind of in-game data (possible an MMORPG): race, level, equipment, guild, items usage, hp/mp rate, level-up mean time, hours played by day/week/month, log-in/log-off time, etc.

The kind of problems I'd like to tackle could be represented as questions like:

• What are the chances a player is likely to pass the game [in X seconds]?
• What are the best X guilds to be with in order to meet my expectations as a player and not end up being expelled?
• What is the best world area in order to level-up faster now while minimizing death possibilities?

Answer 1

It's not precisely deep data, but check out what Valve Software makes available at http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

The Day of Defeat stats at http://www.dayofdefeat.com/stats/ might be the closest for what you're looking for. That said, none of the offerings have a lot of data.

You might also consider contacting Valve to see if they would share any additional data with you.

Answer 2

I suspect a lot of the information that you're after companies would consider commercially sensitive. The reason they gather all that data is to help them make more money by improving their games. Giving away that information to their competitors is probably not something they'd want.

If you look at the acknowledgements on the last page of that pdf you mentioned it's clear that the authors work for the game developer.

Your best option is probably to write your own game which collects the data you're interested in, although that will take a lot of time and effort to get what you're after.

Answer 3

i think mortal online released a map showing locations of player deaths some time back,

however why not think of it another way, give a few companies a call and tell them what you are doing and if they are willing to help, tell them anything you learn you will share with them, i'm sure some will be more than willing to pass some free work your way