We spidered tonnes of data to capture a premium snapshot of entire World of Warcraft realms. We were interested in the question: What are the factors that lead to a successful arena team? Is it prior or current guild association? We found that arena teams that do well tend to have members with higher closeness scores in the network. Teams that didn’t do well had members with lower closeness scores. We saw this across realms. Does knowing the right people make you a better player, or do good players find each other in a virtual “winners circle”, we need more data and experimentation to answer that.

The visualization was published in a very beautiful book called Visual Complexity.

Other people: Yarun Luon, John Suciu, Matthew Rubinstein