Traffic Comparison of a Series of MMORPGs

This paper measures and compares the traffic of a series of Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games(MMORPG). The target games are 'Lineage' and 'Lineage II' developed by NCsoft, which are ones of the world's largest MMORPGs in terms of the number of concurrent users. We collected about 1 tera bytes of packets of 'Lineage II' for four days including a weekend. These packets are analyzed and compared with those of 'Lineage.' Packet size, packet inter-arrival time, and bandwidth usage are compared. The traffic of the two games shows much difference because original 'Lineage' is a kind of 2-D based MMORPG, while 'Lineage II' is 3-D based. By comparing the characteristics of the traffic of these games, we can anticipate future needs of network and game structure.