Efficient management of data center resources for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Abstract

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CAMEO: Enabling social networks for Massively Multiplayer Online Games through Continuous Analytics and cloud computing

“…Several large player communities asked and obtained from the designers of RuneScape to revert particular design changes [10]. The average experience increase is a type of analysis that can show, for a community of players, if their advancement rate is similar to the design expectation.…”

“…This approach is unattractive for MMOG analytics, because the number of potential users varies greatly on both short and long time periods, and the variation is difficult to predict [10]. Instead, MMOG communities could rely on ondemand resources provisioned from a cloud only when and for how long needed.…”

“…Performance, scalability, and robustness While these are traditional system challenges, MMOGs raise specific challenges. The population size of successful commercial MMOGs ranges from a few thousands of players to a tens of millions of players [10]. Popular MMOGs generate massive amounts of information; for example, the database logging user actions for Everquest 2, a popular MMOG, stored over 20 new terabytes (TB) of data per year for each of the peak years of the game.…”

“…However, not responding to failures can quickly lead to community shrinking; we have experienced before [10] en-masse departure of gamers, based on rumored or real system problems. The challenge is to build a robust system, that is, a system that fails rarely and can respond to failures quickly.…”

“…MMOG Case Study: RuneScape RuneScape is a popular MMOG, ranking in Aug 2008 as second by number of players in the US and European markets among MMORPG (about 7 million active players, second to World of Warcraft) [10], and number one by number of opened accounts (over 135 million). RuneScape offers detailed player identifiers through a Web (legacy) interface, and player data through a Web 2.0 interface.…”