Action specific Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games traffic analysis
Mirko Sužnjević, Maja Matijašević, Ognjen Dobrijević · 2008
In Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) players can perform various actions in the virtual world. We try to answer the question how is generated network traffic, and to what extent, dependent of the action that player performs and overall context/situation in the virtual world. We have divided action types in four major categories: questing, trading, raiding, and player versus player (PvP) combat. We have carried out action-specific measurements of the network traffic for the World of Warcraft (WoW) game and gathered 1.28 GB of data on which the analysis was performed. The traffic analysis included network bandwidth usage, packet payload size, percentage of data packets in the total traffic, packet rate, and packet interarrival and interdeparture times. While the category of PvP combat has highest overall demands on the client side traffic, raiding imposes highest demands on the server side. Trading showed lowest demands on the both sides in almost all categories of the analysis.