A popular MMORPG, GW2, has recently released its third expansion. Using the Twitter API, through tweepy, to collect data and BERT to estimate sentiment, we can get an idea of how has the game being received by the community.
After conducting this analysis the game seems a success and the community seem to appreciate and enjoy the new release by ArenaNet.
Since the data was collected, a few things appearing in negative tweets have been adressed by the developer (e.g. fixed bugs) which could mean that the number of positive tweets would be even higher.
The data was collected using Tweepy to connect to the Twitter API. More than 1,000 tweets were collected containing the hashtag '#GW2EOD' for Guild Wars 2, End of Dragons -the new release from the game developer ArenaNet.
Python version: 3.9.7 Packages: Tweepy, Pickle, NumPy, Pandas, Re, Transformers, TextBlob, Torch, WordCloud, Matplotlib
- Collected data using Tweepy and the Twitter API
- Instantiated a BERT model, "finetuned to sentiment analysis on product reviews that predicts the sentiment of the review as a number of stars (between 1 and 5)" source
- Cleaned the dataset using regex and the Re library
- Applied the model to the clean dataset to obtain the sentiment of each tweet
- Plotted cloud of words from negative tweets (sentiment = 1) & from positive tweets (sentiment = 5)
- Using TextBlob, got the subjectivity and the polarity of each tweet
We can see that the vast majority of tweets are positive regarding the new release:
Among those who seem to appreciate the game we can see that they find the new game "fun", "amazing", and "beautiful".
Whereas people who seem to have a lower sentiment towards the new release seem to have a problem with the "meta" (probably the final "meta" event --that is currently known for its difficulty), the "bugs" and probably the time that it takes to do some parts of the game as "hour" seems to be associated with negative tweets.
After the data was collected, the game developer has announced that some bugs have been fixed, some of which included the final event that seemed to generate frustration among the players. This could indicate that this negativity and this word cloud could significantly change after recollecting data in the following days.
Finally, tweets presenting a high sentiment towards the game seem relatively more subjective than those who are not so enchanted with the new expansion.
Unsurprisngly, the higher the sentiment gets, the higher the polarity (positive view). More unexpected, tweets that seem to lowly score the game still have a positive, although close to zero, polarity, meaning that the statements shared are still somewhat positive, or at least not that negative.
Overall, the game seems a success and the community seem to appreciate and enjoy the new release by ArenaNet.