A long-term study of a popular MMORPG

Abstract

Over the last decade, Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), have become big business. In typical MMORPGs, players pay a monthly subscription to the game publisher who hosts the game and provides periodic content updates. To be successful, game publishers must characterize their player population so that they can provision sufficient resources to support the game and so that they can update the game in a timely manner. To this end, this paper provides the first, long-term study of a popular MMORPG from its launch. Our dataset encompasses the entire lifetime of "EVE Online" [1, 2], a science-fiction based MMORPG that has supported nearly 1 million unique players, 67 million player sessions, and 17,000 player years of gameplay since its launch in May 2003.