research-article

A measurement study of virtual populations in massively multiplayer online games

Authors:

Daniel Pittman,

Chris GauthierDickeyAuthors Info & Claims

NetGames '07: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games

Pages 25 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/1326257.1326262

Published: 19 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding the distributions and behaviors of players within Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) is essential for research in scalable architectures for these systems. We provide the first look into this problem through a measurement study on one of the most popular MMOGs, World of Warcraft [15]. Our goal is to answer four fundamental questions: how does the population of the virtual world change over time, how are players distributed in the virtual world, how much churn occurs with players, and how do they move in the virtual world. Through probing-based measurements, our preliminary results show that populations fluctuate according to a prime-time schedule, player distribution and churn appears to occur on a power-law distribution, and players move to only a small number of zones during each playing session. The ultimate goal of our research is to design an accurate player model for MMOGs so that future research can predict and simulate player behavior and population fluctuations over time.

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A measurement study of virtual populations in massively multiplayer online games

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cover image ACM Conferences

NetGames '07: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games

September 2007

138 pages

ISBN:9780980446005

DOI:10.1145/1326257

Conference Chair:
Grenville Armitage
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 19 September 2007

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NetGames07: 6th Annual Workshop on Network Systems Support for Games

September 19 - 20, 2007

Melbourne, Australia

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https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3377141
Emmert-Streib FTripathi SDehmer M(2023)Human Team Behavior and Predictability in the Massively Multiplayer Online Game WOT BlitzACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/361750918:1(1-27)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617509
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Viljanen MAirola AHeikkonen JPahikkala T(2018)Playtime Measurement With Survival AnalysisIEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TCIAIG.2017.272764210:2(128-138)Online publication date: Jun-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCIAIG.2017.2727642
Keller JLaurent M(2017)DiverealProceedings of the 15th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games10.5555/3167906.3167917(46-48)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2017
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Mildner PTriebel TKopf SEffelsberg W(2017)Scaling Online Games with NetConnectorsComputers in Entertainment10.1145/281838315:3(1-21)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2017
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Siqueira ECastanho CRodrigues GJacobi R(2017)A Data Analysis of Player in World of Warcraft Using Game Data Mining2017 16th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames)10.1109/SBGames.2017.00009(1-9)Online publication date: Nov-2017
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