Analysis of area revisitation patterns in world of warcarft

Abstract

This paper analyzes area revisitation patterns in World of Warcraft (WoW). Online-game players roam a number of in-game areas while playing the game and revisit some of them with different personal reasons. To clarify this issue, we conduct a large-scale analysis using WoW access log collected for two years consisting of more than sixty thousand characters and have discovered four main groups of area revisitation patterns. We describe also in the paper how our findings can be utilized to support both game developers and players. © 2009 Springer.