The Anatomy of a Large Mobile Massively Multiplayer Online Game
Ashish Patro, Yadi Ma, Michael Griepentrog, Isaac Hall, Shravan Rayanchu, Suman Banerjee
Wisconsin Wireless and NetworkinG Systems (WiNGS) Laboratory, UW-Madison
MOTIVATION
• Rapid growth of smartphones and Internet enabled
handheld devices + third party applications
• Need to better understand and characterize the
smartphone + application ecosystem
• Games constitute an important chunk of these
applications
• Study of Parallel Kingdom, a MMORPG available for
iPhone & Android
• Long-term measurement study
• Trace spanning around 555 days, 100,000+ unique
players, ~70 countries and ~800 observed ISPs
• Need to analyze :
• Game characteristics : Analysis of trends related
to game’s population
• Network characteristics (WiFi vs. Cellular) :
Analyze network delay and TCP behavior
• Mobility characteristics : Study the mobility
patterns of the application users
• Expenditure characteristics : Study the impact of
various factors on the players’ money spending
behavior
GAME CHARACTERISTICS
The number of daily active
players suddenly increases
after each game update,
then decreases/stabilizes
with time.
MOBILITY CHARACTERISTICS
• Coarse grained
location analysis
• Using co-ordinate
(latitude-longitude)
Information returned
by the device
NETWORK MEASUREMENTS
Connect
to the
Game
“Hello”
(TCP and
UDP)
Game Server
Clients
Measurement Server
Game Running
About two thirds of players
play in multiple places each
day.
Game Server
Clients
CDF of the number of unique locations
travelled by players on a single day.
Measurement Server
EXPENDITURE CHARACTERISTICS
NETWORK CHARACTERISTICS
Network conditions (RTTs)
affect money spent in the
game. Good network
conditions promote Money
Spending by the players.
Daily active players across time.
Relationship between normalized average food players
spent per time unit and average RTT of sessions.
Application level RTT distribution
for Cellular and WiFi devices.
RTT with different cellular ISPs.
Amongst sessions with
Food consumption, longer
sessions are usually
associated with more Food
consumption.
Android platform exhibits
an increasing trend in
popularity. The number of
Android players eventually
exceeds the number of
iPhone players.
Platforms used by players starting from Age 2.
Relationship between session lengths and
normalized Food spent in sessions.
TCP performance.
RTTs for different ISPs for WiFi
based players.