Overview
 

From the perspective of game system designers, players' behavior is one of the most important factors they must consider when designing game systems. To gain a fundamental understanding of the game play behavior of online gamers, exploring users' game play time provides a good starting point. This is because the concept of game play time is applicable to all genres of games and it enables us to model the system workload as well as the impact of system and network QoS on users' behavior. It can even help us predict players' loyalty to specific games.

We present the World ofWarcraft Avatar History (WoWAH) dataset, which comprises the records of 91,065 avatars. The data includes the avatars' game play times and a number of attributes, such as their race, profession, current level, and in-game locations, during a 1,107-day period between Jan. 2006 and Jan. 2009.

Trace Description
We collected the data over 1,107 days between Jan. 2006 and Jan. 2009. During the monitored period, 91,065 avatars, and 667,032 sessions associated with the avatars were observed. Because the sampling interval was 10 minutes, there should have been 159,408 samples, each providing the status of all the avatars online during the sampling period. To protect players' privacy, we mapped the avatars' names and guild names randomly as positive integers with a consistent mapping (i.e., the same names were always mapped to the same integers). A summary of the dataset is presented in Table 1.

Trace Summary

A log file is composed of two arrays: Persistant_Storage and RoundInfo. All the information collected about the avatars' history is stored in the Persistant_Storage array. Each element stores the information about an avatar observed during the sampling period; thus, the number of elements is equal to the number of avatars online in that sampling interval. An element is a string that contains 11 fields separated by commas. The 11 fields are dummy, query time, query sequence number, avatar ID, guild, level, race, class, zone, dummy, dummy. The meanings and valid values of the fields are detailed in Table 2. We also provide three sample records in Table 3. The first record, which relates to the initial query, indicates that we observed an avatar with ID 467 at 23:59:39 on 01/01/2006, and the avatar was a level-1 non-guilded Orc Warrior in Orgrimmar.

Field Explanations

Example Records

Download
Direct Link: World of Warcraft Avatar History (RAR format, 577,334,422 bytes)
Reference
  Yeng-Ting Lee, Kuan-Ta Chen, Yun-Maw Cheng, and Chin-Laung Lei, "World of Warcraft Avatar History Dataset", In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia Systems 2011, Feb 2011.
Contact

If you have any question and/or comments regarding WOWAH, or if you want to list your publications on this page, please feel free to contact Kuan-Ta Chen at swc@iis.sinica.edu.tw.