Statistical properties of online avatar numbers in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game

Zhi-Qiang Jiang, Fei Ren, Gao-Feng Gu, Qun-Zhao Tan and Wei-Xing Zhou

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2010, vol. 389, issue 4, 807-814

Abstract: Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have been very popular in the past few years. The profit of an MMORPG company is proportional to how many users registered, and the instant number of online avatars is a key factor to assess how popular an MMORPG is. We use the online–offline logs on an MMORPG server to reconstruct the instant number of online avatars per second and investigate its statistical properties. We find that the online avatar number exhibits one-day periodic behavior and clear intraday pattern, the fluctuation distribution of the online avatar numbers has a leptokurtic non-Gaussian shape with power-law tails, and the increments of online avatar numbers after removing the intraday pattern are uncorrelated and the associated absolute values have long-term correlation. In addition, both time series exhibit multifractal nature.

Keywords: Sociophysics; MMORPG; Intraday pattern; Distribution; Correlations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:389:y:2010:i:4:p:807-814

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2009.10.028

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