User-Oriented Load Balancing Scheme for MMORPG
MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games) follows a client–server model that has the numerous gaming users with many interactions at the same virtual world, massive loading that result in delays, resource shortages, and other such problem
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Abstract MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games) follows a client–server model that has the numerous gaming users with many interactions at the same virtual world, massive loading that result in delays, resource shortages, and other such problems occur. To solve this, many developers devote research to load-balancing servers, yet due to steady and dynamic map divisions, such research is unreliable. Many developers propose algorithms to distribute the load on the server nodes, but the load is usually defined as the number of players on each server, what is not an ideal results. So, we propose a gaming user-oriented load balancing scheme for the load balancing of MMORPG servers in this paper. This scheme shows effectiveness at dealing with hot-spots and other gatherings of gaming users at specific servers compared to previous methods.
Keywords MMORPG Load balancing User oriented Seamless Gaming user
1 Introduction A Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) is immensely popular with several commercial games reporting millions of subscribes. Most of them require huge virtual worlds, significant hardware requirements, and dedicated support staffs [1]. The main characteristic of MMORPGs is the large number of
H.-Y. Kim (&) Major in Game Software, School of Games, Hongik University, Shinan-ri, Jochiwon-eup, Yoengi-gun, Chungnam 339-701, South Korea e-mail: [email protected]
K. J. Kim and K.-Y. Chung (eds.), IT Convergence and Security 2012, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 215, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-5860-5_61, Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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players, having dozens, or even hundreds, of thousands of participants simultaneously. This large number of players interesting with one another generates traffic on the support network which may grow quadratic compared to the number of players in the worst case [2]. MMORPGs follow a client–server model. When using client–server architecture, it is necessary that the server intermediates the communication between each pair of players that game is intended to provide guaranties of consistency and resistance to cheating. Each of the players remotely controls one or several in game characters called avatars. So, this server will have a large communication load, thus, it must have enough resources to meet the demand of the game. The problem is that it must be delegated to each server node a load proportional to its power when using a distributed server. No matter to which server each player is connected, their game experience will be similar and the time it takes to be notified of actions from other players as well as of state change in the virtual environment of the game [3–5]. The Players can freely move their avatars through the game world. This makes possible the formation of hot-spots around which the players are more connected than in other regions of the virtual environment. MMORPGs not only permit but also stimulate the formation of these points of interest [6–9]. However, if thes
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