Ars Technica posted an article (yesterday afternoon at the time of writing) reporting that Sony was handing over their logs of data from Everquest 2, which ammounts to over 60 Terabytes. This data includes social interactions, game data, account info, and a demographic research of subscribers. I'm pretty sure that rivals facebook's extensive data logs, and hopefully it will be used for good, and not just trying to milk more money out of customers.



So, what do they plan to use this data for? Well, the Ars Technica article goes into detail with some of the aspects of what some of the researchers plan to do with it (A sociological review, a computer scientist that's done a bunch of research on data mining, and demographic/geographical studies). My guess is that they'll hopefully publish a report stating their findings, and that other developers will use the data to make their MMOs more appealing to a wider audience, or just find more ways to milk their customers even more. Who knows though, maybe they'll actually get some developers to think twice about making a boss that takes 18 hours to kill.

What do the people of the Cblogs think? Will Sony's passing on of this outrageous amount of data help the advancement of MMOs in terms of design (lol), or will it just make them more of a cash cow than they already are?