Networking, Games, and Virtual Environments : Gaming

Interesting Cheating Talk

John L. Miller — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:48:00 GMT

Jon Crowcroft pointed me at an extremely interesting talk by Dan Ariely on Cheating. Take a peek if you're interested in cheating and cheater behavior, especially as influenced by group dynamics, it'll be 15 minutes well spent.

Crashing WoW servers

John L. Miller — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:35:00 GMT

Yesterday I was forwarded a link about retirement of a long-time player from World of Warcraft. While that in itself might be interesting, the really juicy bit was the way he went out: with a mighty 'crash' from the server. Scalability issues, or something else?

Check out Boom's Goodbye Blog, where he describes his farewell, including the convergence of more than 1,000 players in a single capital city, and three different 40-party groups (in addition to lots of individuals) engaging in combat.

It's nice to see that WoW can scale past the 100-200 player limit (within mutual interaction range) I had privately hypothesized. It would be very interesting to find out exactly how many it could support sustained!

Distributed Virtual Environment Scalability

John L. Miller — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:26:00 GMT

In the previous post I parrotted scalability figures for World of Warcraft. While investigating DVE's, I tripped across interesting figures for WoW and several other environments.

Halo-3

From this press release, we can see that in the first week of Halo-3's release,

2.7 million people played Halo-3 online
They logged 40 million hours of online play that week

That's absolutely astonishing for a single game! 40 million hours is 19,230 US person YEARS of work, in a week!

World of Warcraft

From Neilsen video game figures for September 2007, we see that

WoW was the most popular PC game by a factor of 3
The average player played 1051 minutes per week - 17.5 hours!

If the math holds up, that's 10 million subscribers * 17.5 hours/wk = 175 MILLION hours of WoW play per week, or 84,135 US person years of work equivalent for each week of play.

As a side note, "Traffic Analysis and Modeling for World of Warcraft" describes WoW traffic overall, and says the median download bandwidth for a player is 6.9 kbps, and the median uplink is 2.1 kbps. If we accept the peak number of simultaneous active users as 900,000, that's a total of 6.2 Gbps peak average upload from WoW datacenters for gameplay. Imagine all the processing that goes into calculating what's being communicated... Zowie!

Second Life

It's difficult to find reliable statistics for Second Life, and I haven't gone far into the research literature. From my own observations and inferences, and a quick search on the internet

Online user population tends to be between 25,000 and 50,000 at the times I connect.
A given region (a land parcel whose simulation is handled by a single server, and whose inhabitants can interact) looks able to support no more than one or two hundred users. I've seen limits of 63 attendees at invitation-only performance events, for 'technical reasons', which makes me wonder if perhaps the limit isn't 64 users per region?
Checking just now, it says 1,271,025 users have logged in in the last 60 days. Several months ago I saw a figure of 25,000 to 50,000 new accounts per day. If those numbers hold true on an average day today, and each new user logs in once, that would be 1.8M to 3M unique user logins. This leaves me uncertain of the active returning population in Second Life. Does anyone have better figures?

Anyways, enough random numbers for now. If you have anything to add, please leave a comment or send me mail, this sort of stuff is fascinating for me.

World of Warcraft hits 9M + active subscribers!

John L. Miller — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:06:00 GMT

The holidays gave me a chance to re-acquaint myself with World of Warcraft (WoW). I have to say, it's still the single most impressive online game I've ever seen. For my money, it does everything right. It literally *is* for my money, since I'm one of those paying 9 million subscribers.

I'm researching distributed virtual environment (DVE) scalability. As part of that, I was curious about the populations in WoW, both numbers supported per server, and total number of simultaneously active users. "A Measurement Study of Virtual Populations in Massively Multiplayer Online Games" provides a great peek into WoW, based on results from the CensusPlus UI add-in for WoW. Based on that paper, and on CensusPlus results published at http://www.warcraftrealms.com/, it appears:

There's a peak of almost 900,000 simultaneous users logged in and playing in the US and EU.
Average daily populations on a given server fluctuate by around a factor of 4-5 between minimum and maximum number of players online.
The peak number of simultaneous users on a given server appears to be around 4,000.
Data on maximum users in a zone (able to interact directly) isn't provided, but appears to be on the order of a couple hundred.

I've downloaded and added CensusPlus to my characters addins. It's out of date, but still works fine with 2.3. It's fun to see the numbers for your own server.

In summary, congratulations Blizzard on the incredibly successful World of Warcraft, and thank you researchers and add-in developers for giving us insight into player populations!

Second Life - Reality sets in?

John L. Miller — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 10:46:00 GMT

Earlier I commented about the disparity in numbers quoted for Second Life's population. It's not that any of the numbers are wrong - for what's being expressed, they're no doubt correct. Rather, it's a question of what's being measured. For my money, steady-state population, and those willing to pay for the experience are both fine metrics.

A recent LA Times article talks about a trend of some large businesses either reducing or eliminating their presence in Second Life. The article is short, insightful, and worth reading IMO. Some key quotes from that article:

"Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on, said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research."
"[Philosophy professor Peter Ludlow] said most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself."
"Between May and June, the population of active avatars declined 2.5%, and the volume of U.S. money exchanged within the world fell from a high of $7.3 million in March to $6.8 million in June."

My two specific longest-term motivations for being a computer scientist are making games and to enable some sort of global cyber space, not that I've done much for either of these in the last decade.

Where's the future of virtual communities and communications, and for that matter, is there one? I still think lack of a payoff for time invested in Second Life is its biggest conceptual challenge. World of Warcraft (WoW) has an incentive and reward structure built in, with social interaction as a side-benefit. WoW continues to do well, with more than 8.5 million subscribers, each paying more than $10 a month for the privilege.

World of Warcraft taps a large existing community - computer gamers - and offers an experience attractive to that community with significant value-adds. Perhaps the biggest challenge in Second Life is that the only existing community it really taps into are those who frequent online social mechanisms such as ICQ, MUD/MOO, and others, and press and the curious inspired by the press, who are no doubt a highly transient population.

I definitely want to see Second Life (or similar environments) succeed. It seems like they need to offer something else, though, in order to be anything more than a niche application.

May the best bot win...

John L. Miller — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:16:00 GMT

There are two broad areas in gaming I want to take a closer look at. The first is distributed games, and models for ensuring fairness and cheat-proofing. The second is issues which affect game play quality, such as latency and jitter in network connections. As part of this research, I need a way of reproducibly simulating the impact of game system changes - including resulting jitter and latency - on playability.

One way to do this is to create a simulated player which reacts to perceived inputs, monkey with those inputs, and then see how the simulated player does. In other words, editing bots.

But which game to use? I'm looking seriously at two choices right now, and hoping for a few others to consider.

Quake supports bots, though I'm not sure if they're scriptable. Since Quake III source is available under GPL, though, it hardly matters except as a question of difficulty.
Unreal's got a very detailed scripting language. I'm going to load up UT2004 tomorrow for the first time in years, and check out exactly what's available.

I'm investigating a few other games as well, such as Half-Life 2 and Battlefield 2142, but I'm not too optimistic.

Ease of scripting the bots and affecting their inputs / storing state is a requirement. Equally important is whether the game is recent, and if there's a large enough online community for results for that game to be interesting. This is a harder question. I've mostly been playing Xbox-360 games for the last year, and am somewhat out of touch with the most popular FPS / latency sensitive PC games out there.

So, my questions for you, gentle reader:

Do you have a recommendation for a latency-sensitive game with scriptable bots I should investigate?
What are the most popular online PC games which are latency sensitive? Note that games like Warcraft and World of Warcraft aren't sensitive enough to qualify for this work.

Do tell :)

Halo3 Beta - you TOO can play

John L. Miller — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 14:57:00 GMT

I just tripped across news that the Halo-3 Beta is going to be opened up to public applications to join. One of the ways you can apply is by playing Halo-2 online between Feb 1 and Feb 3, and then registering on a specific website. Another is to buy a copy of Crackdown for the 360 that's appropriately marked, and use the Beta code inside it. You can find more information at http://www.xboxtoday.ca/01032007/23/xbox_360_two_paths_to_halo_3_beta

Bungie's Frankie also posts information about the beta, see http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?cid=9376

I'm really looking forward to the Beta! Bungie has a history of outdoing themselves with each release of Halo, so Halo-3 will undoubtedly be the best ever! Judging from the number of Halo-2 games I've played online, it's very unlikely I'll get much sleep when the beta comes out, or when the final product is released.

See you in the Beta, if you're lucky!

Fiddling with Second Life

John L. Miller — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:36:00 GMT

I downloaded Second Life yesterday and played with it some. I was impressed with how good it looked given the relatively small size of the installer. It must be doing some significant texture transfer in the background to flesh out the world, depending upon where you go to.

The application was easy to install and start running. Controls were fairly intuitive for someone familiar with FPS games, and even if you're not there was a great deal of easily accessible help. There were a few sample games near the starting point, including a 3D version of space invaders.

After familiarizing myself with the controls and environment, I teleported to the closest major server, apparently in Korea. I wandered around for a few minutes but didn't find much to do. I opened up the search screen and was able to move to a Washington-based server, which had a much fuller environment. I even found a few stores peddling virtual wares. I browsed the goods, and then asked myself the critical question: what now?

What now indeed. Second Life is a well executed environment modeled around the properties of our physical world, yet with liberties in personal appearance and navigation that make it much more convenient. Having said this, it still doesn't necessarily have a lot to offer me. I play computer games, watch TV, and travel for entertainment. Most of these activities are goal-based. Unfortunately Second-life doesn't appear to have a way of satisfying goals like these. It's like a MOO, an interactive mutable environment where you can add your own content and chat with friends. A virtual mall to hang out in, without the easily accessible fast food.

Second Life has gotten a lot of press lately, which would make you think there's millions of people wandering around in this virtual world, making tens of thousands of dollars if they choose to sell their handiwork. When I signed in, the welcome screen indicated a unique population of a few million accounts, 800,000 of which had logged in over the previous month. Not bad. On the other hand, I checked out their subscriber numbers from http://www.mmogchart.com/ based on data from July '06. It shows that about 125,000 users were willing to pay a bit of money each month to continue using the system, an important metric IMO. For the same period, World of Warcraft was showing 6.5 MILLION subscribers. Second Life isn't a game, and that probably contributes to the significantly lower user base.

Will Second Life sink or swim? For what it is, I think the developers and people participating have done a great job. BUT, it doesn't provide an experience I personally find compelling. I'm too goal-oriented, far better suited to an experience-based game-centered virtual world like World of Warcraft. Nowhere near the same freedom, but a fine platform for competition and entertainment, while still providing a way to get together with my buddies and chat.

If you've used Second Life or other virtual environments, I'd be very interested to hear what you think. Am I missing the point? And if you haven't tried it, it might be worth a peek. It only takes a few minutes to download, and it doesn't cost a cent to explore.

And now for something completely different...

John L. Miller — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 11:44:00 GMT

So far I've mostly written about issues that come up in my day-to-day development life, and not very often at that. Starting with my next post, most of what I write about will be related to my research efforts, and I should be posting more frequently. So what are my research interests?

So glad you asked!

I got into computers almost 25 years ago out of a love for gaming, especially simulation games. Playing them, sure, but also wanting to program them. Later my interests expanded to include all of computer science, and especially two frontier areas, virtual environments (think cyberpunk) and AI. I've figured out a way to combine my interest in at least two of these, as virtual environments are becoming commonplace in massively multiplayer games.

Having a planet-scale detailed virtual environment that everyone can use (and play games on) has been pure fantasy for quite a while. Among other challenges, the hardware just hasn't been there to handle the rendering, communications, and storage required for such an endeavor. And even if you had such hardware, communications at the rates required to support such environments was prohibatively expensive

I don't think hardware and connectivity are issues anymore. Even the previous generation of games and CAD packages underscore the ability of a new home machine to render synthetic 3D scenes at several times the resolution of home televison, more than high-def enough to fuel immersion. As for communication, typical home broadband is more than two orders of magnitude faster than modems, and again more than fast enough to show the data for complex interactions with many people, as World of Warcraft proves.

Still, there are challenges. World of Warcraft has more than 7 million unique subscribers, with hundreds of thousands online at any given time. But, these subscribers don't all get to play in the same environment at the same time. The world servers are carefully created to keep too many people from interacting at once. Simply put, the software design can't cope with too many players in any one part of the world. What's more, most players are limited to only ever interacting with a small fraction of the total player base. Consistency requirements force Blizzard to implement World of Warcraft as a server-based model, limiting the number of players who can be in a given copy of the world to tens of thousands. It's an impressive achievement, but a long ways away from a planet-scale virtual environment.

How do we fix this? Software, of course. But nobody's quite sure what that software should look like.

For my part I think the answer lies in peer-to-peer infrastructure. But, applying P2P to this domain is fraught with complications. The two most significant are consistency and fairness. How do you make sure everyone's view of the world is consistent, or at least reconcileable? How do you make sure that people aren't gaining advantage by manipulating the virtual world's rules to benefit themselves?

It's a fine question. I'll tell you my best guess as reserach moves forward :)

Halo3 Announced!

John L. Miller — Wed, 10 May 2006 09:16:00 GMT

Halo-3 has been announced! I was a rabid Halo-2 fan for ages, playing around 2,000 matches online, so this is welcome news.

Halo-2 had a lot of great features. The offline game was great and looked very nice. It had very good balance for online matches, a good ranking system, a nice selection of weapons and a great layout for most of the online play areas, and online access to lots and lots of statistics. It was a significant improvement over Halo-1 IMO overall, which is saying something.

I'm looking forward to Bungie making the same sort of improvement in gameplay and experience for Halo-3, though I'm not sure how they could manage to top Halo-2!

Check out http://www.bungie.net for the trailer and news. Heck, you can even download the trailer on XBox-360 live, if you've got a 360. In a word, sweeeet...

Games for a living?

John L. Miller — Tue, 09 May 2006 14:28:00 GMT

I've done games-related development off and on for the last twenty years. In 1985 I quit my job and worked four months trying (unsuccessfully) to make a game for the Apple II, "NinjaQuest". In the early 90's I made a Windows SDK sample of a multiplayer game using the then-new multimedia API's. In the mid-1990's I got hooked on Muds and had a brief stint as a coder on LegendMud. In 2000 I joined the Flight Simulator team for eight months, putting together an X-file exporter for use with GMAX, and doing some minor coding for the scripting engine and the instrument lighting. Why did I do all this? Because I LOVE games. I like playing them, I like working on them. Even though I've done a number of game-related projects, Flight simulator was the only time you could say I was a game developer for a living.

One great pleasure in my current job in MSRC incubation is getting to work with other people who share my passion for gaming. One of these is Ralf Herbrich, co-founder of MSRC's new Applied Gaming group. Ralf is the co-inventor of TrueSkill, along with his fellow APG leader, Thore Graepel. They've got a lot of other exciting work that I can't talk about here yet, but I hope to be able to mention at least one other project they've done in a few more months.

Ralf has just started blogging, you can read his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/rherb. You should pester him to write more about gaming than that complicated machine learning stuff :)

Finally, one quote worth sharing about the nobility of making games, and working in entertainment in general (I wish I could remember who said it). To paraphrase: "People work 40 hours a week. We get to help make the rest of their hours as enjoyable as possible." My hat's off to people who make their living working on games. As long as they keep making them, I'll keep buying them and having a happier life for it.