I want to do my college research on Guild Wars

Flubber was that a sarcastic point you were trying to make!

Like I said, if many of you think GW is a poor topic to talk about suggest alternatives.... good alternatives with lots of information about on the Internet that's not boring...

Maybe a title like "Challenging the Stereotyped: Is Guild Wars for a new generation?"

You could get statistics from many reputable gaming magazines about what ages and genders usually play computer games to counter what you find in Guild Wars. I'd just set up a normal online survey asking all the really obvious questions. Stuff about age, gender, income, family, what type of work they do, what country they're from, etc. Maybe get a couple of people here on the guru from differnt ages/genders/backgrounds to give you interviews, and ask them specifically what drew them to guild wars. Men and women may be drawn to different things, which is another thing that you can then put on the survey. You can then compare that to surveys already done on other types of games and draw your conclusions from there.

That's how I'd do it anyway.

Was that a little helpful?

I just don't see how anything like that will help to write an IT essay. Maybe OP wasn't talking about IT-related matters.

Well it depends what component of his IT course it is. Some courses do ethics and marketing along with just general coding etc. It all depends what the classes specifications are.

Last semester I wrote my Mythology paper on the comparison of the modern rpg to that of the plight of Peruses. Got me an A, used examples ranging from titan quest (which was obvious) to Oblivion, and some older rpgs. I think professors like anything that isn't the same old papers that they normally see.

How about comparing and contrasting GW economy with RL economy behaviors.

I think research on the multitudes of personalities and psychology of the game and the people would be an excellent research project. You could easily gain 20 questions out of this field of study alone. Why do people greif others why is it fun to grief others, why do people play with others, why do they want to play with others why do they think all People suk and won't group with them why do they only group with heroes or henchies why do guilds think they are elite why do players think they are elite why do players act dumb stupid moronic why do players come to forums and act like they know everything about pvp or pve...man there are thousands of questions you could ask and I can answer most all of them.

As a college instructor, I advise you to make sure you have sufficient reputable sources prior to thinking about using GW as the subject of a research paper.
My friend had a student turn in a paper about WoW that cited primarily in-game characters and avatars on message boards. Let's just say the two of us had a good laugh when he showed the paper to me.

My suggestion would be to research the surge in gaming wikis. Start with Game FAQs and sites like GameFAQs.com, and how game walkthroughs were once deeply personal works maintained by deadbeat gamers. Then mention the onslaught of wikis and how they democraticized FAQ writing. Mention how Wikipedia was once full of gaming information, including detailed walkthroughs of games like Half Life and moves and combos analyses of games like Street Fighter. Then point out how these articles were removed from Wikipedia because they were deemed unencyclopedic, but mention that Wikipedia's founder and some leading Wikipedians created a new home for such articles called Wikicities (now known as Wikia). Then note that many gamers (including Guild Wars fans) saw an obvious chance and created their own wikis for the game, some of them (such as WoWWiki) becoming the biggest wikis on the internet. Finally mention how many of these wikis are now consolidated under Wikia, and how it seems highly likely that all future games will have wikis devoted to them as a matter of course, sometimes several wikis with infighting between their respective communities (eg. Oblivion).

Should be enough material for a good article, especially since most of the research can be cited.

Maybe you wanna write about New Generation MMOs as modern Subcultures and their Influence on players' lifes.

If this is an IT paper, perhaps a paper about how Guild Wars (and MMORPGs in general) have to have secure systems, and how they protect their data (or not) from exploits and glitches.

It has always fascinated me the amount of work that goes into creating a fictional universe!

wow lots of options here, you could do something on the economy, the social structure, the guild structure system, battle tactics, eliteism (could be the most provocative), time/style played. SO MANY OPTIONS. Would be fun man. I did a term paper on nintendo, was about 10k words and got am A on it. Loved doing it so it was really really well done.

Lots of very good ideas, I thank you all so much for your input!

This is the biggest problem I face... sources. Would the community be my sources? Or would I need to find websites that talk about Guild Wars and mention those sites in my report?

I think it's worth mentioning that I don't actually have to do the research yet, I have to explain what I am going to do my research on, and the methods I will use to gain that research. I need to speak with my teacher about this as I am not 100% what I am doing lol.

I think it would depend on how scholarly of a paper the prof is asking for. In mine I need to be very scholarly but I have had profs that said things like wikipedia were cool to use. My suggestion is that you talk to the prof and see if they can give you some guidance there.

Don't use the wikipedia as a source. It's not a primary source, and without any sort of peer review system, it's not usable as a secondary source.

However, you could use various magazine articles and published interviews with game designers, Jeff Strain, Gaile Gray, etc as sources. Those are primary sources.

Thats solid advice to go by right there. I would avoid wikipedia too and try to rely on things that have been peer reviewed. Depending on what you are doing you may be able to tie in different studies from different MMo's cause there are lots on WoW and Everquest

I'm curious to know what your null and alternative hypotheses will be.

I think this will be the last time I post in this thread, but I want to make a suggestion first. You guys need to look up the definition for IT. General English class essays can be about anything as well as it's well written. Essays which are supposed to be IT-related aren't wide open.

As I was reading through, I was thinking about these lines, as well. But, as it was mentioned, it depends on what part of IT you're supposed to be studying. If it's a class on programming and the like, I don't imagine it would be a good idea to talk about the economics of a RPG. Plus, it's going to be hard to find good primary resources for most of the topics that have been suggested. Whatever you decide, good luck and may ye procratinate well!