department of telecommunications opatija, 2012 monitoring and analysis of player behavior in world...
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Department of Telecommunications
Opatija, 2012
Monitoring and Analysis of Player Behavior in
World of Warcraft
Mirko Suznjevic, Maja Matijasevic, Borna BrozovicUniversity of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing
Unska 3, Zagreb, Croatia{mirko.suznjevic, maja.matijasevic, borna.brozovic}@fer.hr
Department of TelecommunicationsProblem
¨ How to monitor application level player behavior in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Paying Game (MMORPG)?
¨ Player behavior at application level affects load (both network and server)
¨ Client side solution – wJournal
¨ Results enable: Seamless player behavior monitoring Better infrastructure planning and optimization
Opatija, 2012 2 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsOutline
¨ Problem
¨ Introduction
¨ Categorization of user actions
¨ wJournal
¨ Measurement study
¨ Results
¨ Conclusion
Opatija, 2012 3 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsIntroduction
¨ Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Paying Game (MMORPG) Players assume the role of a character (in a persistent virtual world) and
take control over many of that character's actions
¨ Numbers constantly increasing 460 MMORPGs active / in development (mmorpg.com) 54 million MMO players in USA alone (NewZoo)
¨ Business models Subscription based Selling content updates Selling virtual items (micro transactions)
Ottawa, October 2011 4 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsNumber of subscriptions
Opatija, 2012 5 /18
I. V. Geel. (2012, Mar) Mmodata charts v3.8. [Online]. Available: http://mmodata.net/
Department of Telecommunications
Player behavior at the application level
¨ Session lengths – OK¨ Number of players – OK¨ Session composition – ?
¨ How to measure what exactly players do in MMORPG? Many possible (inter)actions Vast virtual worlds Possibility of countless different situations
¨ Classification (grouping) of possible situations in virtual world Generally applicable Based on both player input and surroundings Meaningful in relation to game design
¨ Approach based on user actions
Ottawa, October 2011 6 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsCategorization
Ottawa, October 2011 7 /18
Number of players
Cooperation level
Dynamics
MobilityNumber of NPCs
Combat
Communication aspect
0
Questing Trading PvP combat Raiding Dungeons
Low
High
Low
High
Department of TelecommunicationsUse case – World of Warcraft
Opatija, 2012 8 /18
World of Warcraft (WoW) market share 2009 subscription market
(Screen Digest)
OtherWorld
ofWarcraft
Department of TelecommunicationswJournal
¨ World of Warcraft Journal - add-on for WoW client
¨ Add-ons are generally self-contained user interface modification components Can be used for multiple purposes Can be dependant on other add-ons (possibility of
libraries)
¨ Evolution from WSA-Logger (World of Warcraft Session Activity Logger) Better GUI Lower resource usage
Opatija, 2012 9 /18
Department of TelecommunicationswJournal – Concept
¨ Events are fired by WoW API when something happens within the virtual world
¨ Some events can be assigned to action categories
¨ Based on captured events, wJournal changes the state machine
Opatija, 2012 10 /18
Questing Trading PvP Combat Questing Trading
Session segments
Department of TelecommunicationswJournal - Implementation
¨ wJournal contains: Lua script files (the actual code which runs the add-
on) Table of contents (metadata) file XML file used to determine the location of, and order
in which Lua scripts (files with .lua extension) are loaded
¨ Add-on creates the log file
¨ Parser implemented in C# parses the log file and outputs an MS Excel spreadsheet
Opatija, 2012 11 /18
Department of TelecommunicationswJournal - Performance
¨ WoW add-on limitation Can write only to settings file (security reasons) Causes add-on to take a lot of memory in long
measurements
¨ Workaround? Add-ons can write into specific chat channels Add-ons can toggle chat history on/off Chat history is a log file!!!
¨ Result – very low memory and processing requirements even in long measurements
Opatija, 2012 12 /18
Department of TelecommunicationswJournal – Screenshot
Opatija, 2012 13 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsMeasurements methodology
Find players Install wJournal PLAY
Report results Process data Submit log files
Opatija, 2012 14 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsMeasurement details
¨ Duration from May 5th, 2011 to June 10th, 2011.
¨ WoW version 4.1.0 (Cataclysm expansion)
¨ 16 players participated 9 male and 7 female Age between 16 and 32 years Average 1,9 characters per player
¨ Measured parameters: Session segment length Session segment probability Location in the virtual world
Opatija, 2012 15 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsResults – location
¨ Uncategorized Mostly (over 75%) spent in capital cities
¨ Trading Almost exclusively performed in capital cities
¨ PvP combat Focused in instanced areas All instanced areas are equally frequently used
¨ Dungeons Maximum level dungeons are used 91% of the time (large amount
of content is not used) ¨ Raiding
Only two instances have ever been visited
Opatija, 2012 16 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsResults – session composition
¨ Action category Time played per probability action category
Opatija, 2012 17 /18
Department of TelecommunicationsConclusion
¨ How to monitor application level player behavior in MMORPGs?
¨ Client side solution – wJournal Detailed measurements Difficult acquisition of players
¨ Testing measurement study
¨ Future work: Tool for server and network load prediction based on
measurement results
Opatija, 2012 18 /18