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

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Department of TelecommunicationsOutline

¨ Problem

¨ Introduction

¨ Categorization of user actions

¨ wJournal

¨ Measurement study

¨ Results

¨ Conclusion

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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)

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Department of TelecommunicationsNumber of subscriptions

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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

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Department of TelecommunicationsCategorization

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Department of TelecommunicationswJournal – Screenshot

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Department of TelecommunicationsMeasurements methodology

Find players Install wJournal PLAY

Report results Process data Submit log files

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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

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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

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Department of TelecommunicationsResults – session composition

¨ Action category Time played per probability action category

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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

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