Online-offline activities and game-playing behaviors of avatars in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game

TL;DR

This study analyzes avatar online-offline behaviors in an MMORPG, classifying active avatars into three types based on their online duration patterns, with implications for game industry applications.

Contribution

It introduces a classification of avatar behaviors based on statistical online duration patterns, revealing three distinct types in MMORPGs.

Findings

Active avatars fall into three behavior types.

Cheater avatars show pulsed online durations.

Remaining avatars exhibit diverse, non-simple distributions.

Abstract

Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are very popular in China, which provides a potential platform for scientific research. We study the online-offline activities of avatars in an MMORPG to understand their game-playing behavior. The statistical analysis unveils that the active avatars can be classified into three types. The avatars of the first type are owned by game cheaters who go online and offline in preset time intervals with the online duration distributions dominated by pulses. The second type of avatars is characterized by a Weibull distribution in the online durations, which is confirmed by statistical tests. The distributions of online durations of the remaining individual avatars differ from the above two types and cannot be described by a simple form. These findings have potential applications in the game industry.