World of Warcraft : a correlation between a virtual economy and real economy

Abstract

MMORPG genre games have a very similar resemblance to real-life since they are based on a large-scale community of people co-existing in a virtual world. Virtual worlds behave parallel to the real world regarding economic factors, since there is a population that can support elaborate decision making while investigating an economy with a multitude of investment opportunities. This thesis aims to analyse patterns using MMORPG data and compare them to real life economical patterns that already have an established behaviour. The outcome of this thesis is a confirmation of analogous behaviour between the virtual and real-world economy.