Abstract
As online games become popular and the boundary between virtual and real economies blurs, cheating in games has proliferated in volume and method. In this paper, we propose a framework for user behavior analysis for bot detection in online games. Specifically, we focus on party play which reflects the social activities among gamers: in a Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), party play is a major activity that game bots exploit to keep their characters safe and facilitate the acquisition of cyber assets in a fashion very different from that of normal humans. Through a comprehensive statistical analysis of user behaviors in game activity logs, we establish threshold levels for the activities that allow us to identify game bots. Based on this, we also build a knowledge base of detection rules, which are generic. We apply our rule reasoner to AION, a popular online game serviced by NCsoft, Inc., a leading online game company based in Korea.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1384-1395 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Computers and Mathematics with Applications |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 May |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Korea , under the “ITRC” support program supervised by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency ( NIPA-2011-C1090-1001-0004 ).
Keywords
- Game bot
- MMORPG
- Online game security
- User behavior analysis
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Modelling and Simulation
- Computational Theory and Mathematics
- Computational Mathematics