Understanding the distributions and behaviors of players within
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) is essential for research
in scalable architectures for these systems. We provide the
first look into this problem through a measurement study on one
of the most popular MMOGs, World of Warcraft [15]. Our goal is
to answer four fundamental questions: how does the population of
the virtual world change over time, how are players distributed in
the virtual world, how much churn occurs with players, and how
do they move in the virtual world. Through probing-based measurements,
our preliminary results show that populations fluctuate
according to a prime-time schedule, player distribution and churn
appears to occur on a power-law distribution, and players move to
only a small number of zones during each playing session. The ultimate
goal of our research is to design an accurate player model
for MMOGs so that future research can predict and simulate player
behavior and population fluctuations over time.
