Comparison of chat from two different nights of raiding in Molten Core... actually just the Ragnaros boss fight. The first night represents the first time we encountered Rags while the second night is when we finally defeated him (on the third attempt). The various colors are different chat channels that we used to communicate. The big orange bits are the main raid channel that everyone could see. The brown are emotes (like hugs and roars and such), yellow is the rogue specific channel that I could see since I was a rogue, and pink is the whisper channel.
This time the colors represent the different character classes in the game. So now I'm grabbing data from more than just the chat logs but also a relational table that has info about each participant. Blue is overrepresented because its the color used for mages. The raid leader was a mage, and you can see that he did a lot of talking.
This time I categorized each line of chat. Pink is strategy talk, red is stuff announced by a third-party tool that we used to announce certain things during fights, purple is when people were casting spells that temporarily boost our abilities (known as buffing), and gray is all other talk (off-task talk mostly). You can see that three months after our initial attempt to kill Ragnaros we tended to do on-task talk much more during our periods of fighting. We had finally identified events in the fight that needed to be called out and did that calling out, partially facilitated by more addon tools that we adopted.
In an effort to get a better sense of how much talk was done by raid leaders and how much by regular raid members, I did this graph. Dark blue is talk by leaders of the raid (we had one main leader and 2 or 3 other sub-leaders).
Green is talk by women, purple by men. This actually is one of the main reasons why I wanted to do these graphs. I had an inkling that women were participating far less than men (they make up about 10% of the chat but make up about 20-25% of the participants)! But this graph is somewhat biased towards men because the main raid leader was a man... so the next graph shows talk by non leaders.
Broken down by gender again, but this time without data from raid leaders. Women are still not talking as much as men... but I don't know exactly why that is yet, and to answer that question probably requires me to delve into the content of the chat again... but doing these graphs let me see patterns that I should be looking for while I do the fuller chat analysis.
