Greetings! My name is Ladan and I'm a PhD research student based in the UK (at Durham University) and I'm researching World of Warcraft and WoW raiders in particular. My research site is http://www.raidingresearch.co.uk . Some of you may already be aware of the research I've been doing on the raiding culture and what distinguishes us from other gamers. So far I have some basic ideas about who we are and what is important to us, like the following:
* We have values--we often have a specific idea of what we expect in a good raider and what makes a good member of the raiding culture
* We are competitive--for many of us we want to excel and exceed expectations
* We like to work hard and play hard--many of us put in a lot of time to achieve success in raiding and to fine tune our characters
* We are willing to learn--we are ok with failure as long as we are learning and progressing
* We are outcomes focused--we live in a world that's got a lot of goals and outcomes to aim for and we like that (we've even made our own ranking system, discussion forums, and theory crafting sites to support this!)
So what now? Well, my work continues apace (please check my site, vote in my polls, and add comments!) and I'm currently writing up my findings. But now I've got something new to share.
Paragon has been a huge help and support to my ongoing research and I'm excited to announce a new mini-research project that we're launching together!
Some time ago, members of Paragon (in their previous guild) did an informal personality test (the Myers-Briggs test) to ascertain what kinds of personalities their new raiders had and how they would fit into the pre-existing raiding team. This wasn't meant to exclude members, but more to understand their approach to gameplay and how they would work on the team. Anecdotally, these members noticed a trend of more common 'types' of personalities who raided, most especially those who were the most successful at raiding.
We'd like to revive that test and see if we've got a trend of personality types among successful raider.
For some more information on personality types (if you want to know how accurate it is and if you see yourself in the description), see: http://www.personalitypage.com/high-level.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers_Brig ... _Indicator . If you want to see how rare or prevalent your personality type is, this is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers_Brig ... evelopment .
What should you do:
1. First off, please complete the test:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp .
Note: There are slightly different tests and I'm sure some may be better than this one, but to make this as accurate as possible, we want everyone to take the same test--also it only takes about 5 minutes at the most, so that's not too painful.
2. Respond to this post with your resulting personality type. You can PM Xenophics or myself (at Ladan here) if you prefer privacy. The personality test result should look something like this:
Your Type is
INFJ
Introverted Intuitive Feeling Judging
Strength of the preferences %
11 62 50 33
(FYI, that's my personality type... scary, I know.)
3. Then include the following info:
** Gender (M/F, pretty sure I didn’t need to explain this… :P)
** Type of server (eg: PVP/PVE/RP, etc)
** Horde or alliance and race (e.g. Horde/Blood Elf)
** Main class and spec played during raids (e.g. Priest: Shadow)
** Language and location of server (eg: EU-English, EU-Russian, etc.)
** A brief description of your type of raiding guild (e.g.: hard core, social/casual, elite, etc.)
NOTE on this: I've given some examples below of types of raiding guilds but feel free to come up with a different description or a hybrid of what I've suggested below--these definitions are troublesome, as I know you'd agree.
NOTE: What do I mean by hard core, elite and social/casual guilds?
HARD CORE: A guild that is primarily focused on raiding, is competitive and generally reaches high rankings on its server or their region (top 100, for example). This guild expects full or majority attendance (majority is something like 80% of the time) on its progress raiding nights. Hard core guilds are often extremely sociable in nature and do other things beyond raiding but raiding is its primary reason for existence.
ELITE: This is a guild that has achieved world or regional firsts in major raiding achievements (such as world first in the LK kill or US first on the Algalon kill). They are basically hard core in nature but they’ve reached an even higher level of achievement.
SOCIAL/CASUAL: A guild that is focused on raiding but also has social elements (social members, other activities beyond raiding) and generally a more forgiving schedule for guild members' personal lives (families, work, school, etc.). It aims to achieve success in raiding but may not be as focused on high rankings or a strict attendance requirement. Like its hard core counterpart, social/casual guilds are often very competitive in nature and have skilled raiders but may have to accept a slightly lower success rate to accommodate its members and schedule.
Thanks! Now go test your personality. J And BE HONEST! There is no wrong personality type.
Ladan
