Identifying MMORPG bots: a traffic analysis approach
EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing - Special issue on signal processing applications in network intrusion detection systems
On the challenge and design of transport protocols for MMORPGs
Multimedia Tools and Applications
Consistency aware update schedule in multi-server Distributed Virtual Environments
Proceedings of the 3rd International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques
World of warcraft avatar history dataset
MMSys '11 Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Multimedia systems
A measurement study regarding quality of service and its impact on multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 9th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
Spatiotemporal analysis in virtual environments using eigenbehaviors
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology
Review: Packet-level traffic analysis of online games from the genre characteristics perspective
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
SMOG: a cloud platform for seamless wide area migration of online games
Proceedings of the 11th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
GamingAnywhere: The first open source cloud gaming system
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP) - Special issue of best papers of ACM MMSys 2013 and ACM NOSSDAV 2013
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Understanding the impact of network conditions on player satisfaction, which is one of the major concerns of network game designers, is a popular research topic. Of the various ways to gauge user satisfaction, in this paper, we focus on how network quality affects a player's decision to leave a game prematurely. To answer this question, we analyze a 1,356-million-packet trace from a large commercial Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) called ShenZhou Online. We show that both network delay and network loss significantly affect a player's decision to leave a game prematurely. It is feasible to predict whether players will quit prematurely based on the network conditions they experience. The proposed model can determine the relative impact of different types of network impairment. For our traces, the degrees of player intolerance to network delay, delay jitter, client packet loss, and server packet loss are in the proportion of 1:2:4:3 approximately. The model can also be used to make system design decisions. Through simulations, we show that by prioritizing server processing according to the goodness of network conditions, employing dejitter buffers, or replacing TCP with a more lightweight transport protocol, the probability of premature departure can be significantly reduced. In this way, we demonstrate how our model of players' network experience provides feedback for the design of online games.