Trends in evolution of the network traffic of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

The history of online video games spans over 30 years, with Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) being one of the most popular genres. Constant evolution of MMORPGs has also brought along the need to understand how emerging game mechanisms and design choices affect the game data traffic characteristics. This paper presents a network data traffic analysis of Guild Wars 2 (GW2), an MMORPG released in 2012, with the idea to draw a comparison between GW2 and older MMORPGs, the characteristics of which are already known from previous studies, and to provide insight into the network traffic trends in this genre. For GW2 analysis, we use game data traffic collected over five weeks' time in an Internet Service Provider core network. The dataset consists of anonymized packet traces corresponding to 19 players who agreed to their network traffic being captured during gameplay. We analyze traffic characteristics, such as packet size, packet inter-arrival times, throughput, and duration of the playing sessions, along with the participants' basic demographic information and their use of voice communication during game play.