Whereas early MMO content made simple distinctions between PvE, PvP, and raid content, current MMOs make much finer distinctions. For example, within PvP, there are PvP duels, small-scale PvP (e.g., battlegrounds in WoW), large-scale PvP (e.g., RvR in Dark Age of Camelot), and open PvP (e.g., in Eve Online or PvP servers). Thus, it’s no longer enough to ask players the simple question of whether they enjoy PvP because a player may love to do battlegrounds in WoW but would not want to be on a PvP server. To get at these finer distinctions in content type, I asked players to rate the appeal of these categories of content on a scale from 1 – 5, where 1 was “Not Appealing At All” and 5 was “Extremely Appealing”.

Below is how the data came out by gender. Overall, it is what is typically referred to as “casual content” that is most highly rated (i.e., solo content and small raids). Note that in the survey, “small raids” was defined as regular 5-man dungeon instances. Another observation is that where there were some gender differences, the general order is roughly the same for both genders. Rated the lowest were high-stress PvP content—duels and open PvP. Content types that require a high level of management and coordination (i.e., large raids and large-scale PvP) received average ratings.