Battle.net

We are researchers at the Cognitive Science Lab (Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada) and are conducting a large-scale study on the development of expertise in StarCraft 2. We believe that the analysis of StarCraft 2 performance has the potential to be very valuable to researchers studying attention, learning, and cognition. Our initial project involves using replay files and survey questions to characterize differences across all skill levels, from bronze to professional. With the community’s support, it could be the largest expertise study ever conducted and may eventually generate positive press coverage for e-Sports and the SC2 community.

Our biggest challenge at this point will be to get a wide variety of players to participate, and to get a lot of them. The size of the study will be one of the big selling points with the academic community so more is definitely better. There are 2 simple ways you can help.

1. Complete the survey, and upload a replay file yourself.
2. Encourage players you know to participate, especially newer players who might not be active in the online community.

If we can get 20,000 players across the full range of skill levels to participate, it will be, by several orders of magnitude, the largest expertise study ever conducted in any domain; bigger than any study on traditional games such as chess, or any sport expertise studies.

We hope that you find our project as exciting and interesting as we do. Your willingness to participate and promote our project is much appreciated.

Please visit http://skillcraft.ca to participate and to get further information.

Yay science!

Done. Good luck on the study.

For anyone interested, the survey took me about 5 minutes to complete it was very user friendly.

Quick and easy!

Done. Super easy. Super cool.
GL HF

+1

Science! Because knowledge is power!

Instructions are super simple and easy only takes a few minutes :)

done and cool

Sounds awesome! I would re-post this periodically so people continue to see it and do it.

thanks! will do.

Sounds good ;D
Will do.

You should probably post this on the TL forum, to.

Any ways, yeah, the survey was pretty easy and fast. I would definitively advice it.

Just submitted mine and subscribed to the mailing list :)

Damnit, I messed up calculating my hours and didn't realize until after I'd submitted it. Oh well, one piece of incorrect data probably won't wreck the entire thing. If it does, well...I'M SORRY!

I went through the whole process, then stopped when I saw that I had to upload a replay.

I don't play 1v1s. Not anymore. And I don't have a replay from when I played 1v1s. So you won't get any data from me because of that.

Making the replay upload optional would have been great, you know.

Gonna have to actually play a ladder game first I guess :/

Never mind

Pretty sure they are legit.

Here are SFU based links to their lab:

http://cslab.psyc.sfu.ca/skillcraft-information-access-strategies/
http://cslab.psyc.sfu.ca/

There's a reddit post with like 600 up votes, and they are on WellPlayed.com's community spotlight.