Player Dynamics in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

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Player Dynamics in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (2007)

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by Xinyu Zhuang , Ashwin Bharambe , Jeffrey Pang , Srinivasan Seshan

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BibTeX

@MISC{Zhuang07playerdynamics,
    author = {Xinyu Zhuang and Ashwin Bharambe and Jeffrey Pang and Srinivasan Seshan},
    title = {Player Dynamics in Massively Multiplayer Online Games},
    year = {2007}
}

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Abstract

Millions of people now participate in Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), placing tremendous and often unpredictable maintenance burdens on their operators. Thus, understanding the dynamic nature of MMOG players is critical for the designers and implementers of the systems and networks that host MMOGs. This paper improves our understanding of player dynamics in MMOGs by collecting and analyzing a 5-month long measurement study of World of Warcraft, a leading commercial MMOG. Our novel findings include the following: First, the distribution of player session lengths is similar to that of peer-to-peer file sharing sessions, despite a game’s interactive nature, but has a shorter tail. Second, we find several good predictors of session length, such as in-game character level or age. Third, despite the social nature of MMOGs, interactivity between players accounts for little of the dependence between sessions of different players, and most sessions are not correlated at long time scales. Fourth, changes to a game’s virtual world can cause dramatic shifts in the population densities of in-game locations, which are otherwise relatively stable. 1

Keyphrases

player dynamic massively multiplayer online game different player social nature novel finding player account player session length long time scale commercial mmog several good predictor dramatic shift host mmogs game interactive nature in-game location unpredictable maintenance burden in-game character level game virtual world massively-multiplayer online game session length 5-month long measurement study population density mmog player peer-to-peer file dynamic nature

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