Monitoring and analysis of player behavior in world of warcraft

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) comprise persistent virtual worlds in which thousands of players are interacting. Information regarding player behavior in MMORPGs is highly relevant for network planning, game design, server load balancing, etc. The main contribution of this paper is wJournal - a tool for detailed measuring of player behavior for the most popular MMORPG - World of Warcraft by Activision Blizzard. The behavioral model on which wJournal is based upon consists of six player action categories (Questing, Trading, PvP combat, Dungeons, Raiding, and Uncategorized). We demonstrate the use of wJournal by monitoring and analysis of 16 players over the course of four weeks´ time.