A measurement study of virtual populations in massively multiplayer online games

Pittman, Daniel; GauthierDickey, Chris

doi:10.1145/1326257.1326262

Cited by 64 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Note that our preliminary results were published in [7], but these results only show initial measurements of World of Warcraft over a smaller data set without any modeling. In this paper, we examine a much larger and complete data set of two MMORPGS, we create models for simulation and analysis, and we show the similarity between both MMORPGs even though their play style differs significantly.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 96%

Characterizing Virtual Populations in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Pittman

GauthierDickey

2010

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Understanding player distributions, sessions, and movements in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) is essential for research in scalable architectures for these systems. We present the first detailed measurement study and the first models of the virtual populations in two popular MMORPGs, World of Warcraft TM and Warhammer Online TM . Our results show that while these two types of MMORPGs are significantly different in play style, the features of their virtual populations can be modeled similarly, allowing future researchers to accurately simulate these types of games.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 96%

Characterizing Virtual Populations in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Pittman

GauthierDickey

2010

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…Resulting NVEs are then very dynamic: data representing objects and avatars may not be uniformly distributed all over the universe. Recent studies of existing popular NVEs like INRIA Second Life [35] and World of Warcraft [36] have shown that the distribution of avatars was extremely disparate [17,24]: most of the avatars are gathered around a few hotspots of interest, while large parts of the NVE are almost desert. The figure 3.a shows an example of an observed avatar distribution in Second Life.…”

Section: Mobility Pattern and Movement Predictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blue Banana: resilience to avatar mobility in distributed MMOGs

Legtchenko

Monnet

Thomas

2010

2010 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems &Amp; Networks (DSN)

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Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) recently emerged as a popular class of applications with millions of users. To offer acceptable gaming experience, such applications need to render the virtual world surrounding the player with very low latency. However, current state-of-the-art MMOGs based on peer-to-peer overlays fail to satisfy these requirements. This happens because avatar mobility implies many data exchanges through the overlay. As state-of-the-art overlays do not anticipate this mobility, the needed data is not delivered on time, which leads to transient failures at the application level. To solve this problem, we propose Blue Banana, a mechanism that models and predicts avatar movement, allowing the overlay to adapt itself by anticipation to the MMOG needs. Our evaluation is based on large-scale traces derived from Second life. It shows that our anticipation mechanism decreases by 20% the number of transient failures with only a network overhead of 2%.

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“…Previous MMOG workload characterizations [11], [21], [22] have either focused on highly interactive games with few players [21], traced small to mid-sized MMOGs [11], [22], or collected data from only one server from a large MMOG [23]. In contrast, our analysis focuses on all server groups of one of the largest commercial MMOGs, RuneScape [24], for which we analyze the workload at server and network level based on server location and on user interactions.…”

Section: Mmog Workload Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient management of data center resources for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Nae

Iosup

Podlipnig

et al. 2008

2008 SC - International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

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Document VersionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of Record (includes final page, issue and volume numbers)Please check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the author's version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Abstract-Today's Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) can include millions of concurrent players spread across the world. To keep these highly-interactive virtual environments online, a MMOG operator may need to provision tens of thousands of computing resources from various data centers. Faced with large resource demand variability, and with misfit resource renting policies, the current industry practice is to maintain for each game tens of self-owned data centers. In this work we investigate the dynamic resource provisioning from external data centers for MMOG operation. We introduce a novel MMOG workload model that represents the dynamics of both the player population and the player interactions. We evaluate several algorithms, including a novel neural network predictor, for predicting the resource demand. Using trace-based simulation, we evaluate the impact of the data center policies on the resource provisioning efficiency; we show that dynamic provisioning can be much more efficient than its static alternative.

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A measurement study of virtual populations in massively multiplayer online games

Cited by 64 publications

References 10 publications

Characterizing Virtual Populations in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Characterizing Virtual Populations in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Blue Banana: resilience to avatar mobility in distributed MMOGs

Efficient management of data center resources for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

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