by Anders Drachen
Given a huge and varied game like Destiny, it is of interest to see if there are any patterns in how people play the game.
There can be a variety of reasons for this – for developers the focus can be on monitoring the players and checking no group emerges that has issues progressing, gaining insights into how to change the game to improve it, all the way to actively detect cheaters, bots and similar. For players, such analyses can be used to show how we can improve or point to new strategies, or just cool to see what the patterns look like and where we fit in them.
There are many ways to find these kinds of patterns, but arguably one of the key analytical methods that has emerged in the past few years in game analytics is behavioral profiling. Profiling can be done in a variety of ways, e.g. focusing on the player base as it is right now, or as it has operated historically via time-series analysis, or even predictively, how we expect behavioral profiles to develop in the future. Here we focus on profiling Destiny players as they behave within a specific moment in time, also referred to as snapshot profiling. Snapshot profiling is pretty useful for understanding how people are playing a game in its current version.
In this post we present player profiles from Destiny – generated just before the Rise of Iron expansion was released. The profiles are focused on performance across a few dozen indicators, and it turns out that the weapons we use and the degree of efficiency with which we use them are the most powerful characterization indicators in Destiny.