Fig 1.
Teams in Travian are formed by the founder of the alliance, who initially holds all the power.
To grow their alliance, the founder invites players to join the team. Here the founder can grant special rights to the new alliance members. These rights give these players the de facto power to fill different roles within the alliance. As players expand their villages, they earn additional points in the game ranking. The ranking of the alliances derives, in turn from the sum of the points of their individual members.
Fig 2.
Splitting the sample of all teams (with 2 to 60 members) into four specific subsamples was a prerequisite for comparing the network patterns of teams of different sizes.
Table 1.
The world of Travian—Traditional controls and independent variables based on Williams’ research agenda for virtual mapping and other tests.
Table 2.
The world of Travian—Contextual and social architectural factors based on Williams’ research agenda for virtual mapping and other tests.
Fig 3.
Teams within Travian constantly form and dissolve.
In the first phase of the game, the number of alliance formations exceeds the number of dissolutions, which finds its peak at the beginning of the middle phase of the game. At this point a massive reorganization process takes place. In the later phases of the game, the number of team dissolutions exceeds the number of new formations, so the number of active teams steadily decreases.
Fig 4.
A schematic representation of the observation periods taken from the mid game phase, starting with day 110 and ending with day 250.
Our modified moving window approach (advancing 30 days at a time) integrated all communication and support relationships that comprised a full 60-day period.
Fig 5.
Correlation of each measure with team performance for the groups of small-, mid-, and large-size teams as well as all teams.
Fig 6.
Correlation of each measure with team performance for the groups of small-, mid-, large-size teams as well as all teams.
Table 3.
Correlation of each network measure with team performance for the groups of small- (15–25 members), mid- (35–45 members), and large-size teams (55–65 members) as well as all teams (10–143 members) (*: p ≤.01, **: p ≤.001).