Abstract
Destiny is a hybrid online shooter sharing features with Massively Multi-Player Online Games and first-person shooters and is the to date the most expensive digital game produced. It has attracted millions of players to compete or collaborate within a persistent online environment. In multiplayer online games, the interaction between the players and the social community that forms in persistent games forms a crucial element in retaining and entertaining players. Social networks in games have thus been a focus of research, but the relationships between player behavior, performance, engagement and the networks forming as a result of interactions, are not well understood. In this paper, a large-scale study of social networks in hybrid online games/shooters is presented. In a network of over 3 million players, the connections formed via direct competitive play are explored and analyzed to answer five main research question focusing on the patterns of players who play with the same people and those who play with random groups, and how differences in this behavior influence performance and engagement metrics. Results show that players with stronger social relationships have a higher performance based on win/loss ratio and kill/death ratio, as well as a tendency to play more and longer.
Highlights
The social networks in persistent online games play a fundamental role in the user experience and retention of players, and building and maintaining communities in games form an important aspect of the design and maintenance of persistent games.The networks forming between players in online games can be difficult to investigate without the right tracking of player interactions and behavior, and are relatively volatile in terms of constant change as the community in a game evolves
While traditional multi-player online games are based on role-playing games (RPGs) or Real-Time Strategy (RTS) elements, Bungie, the developer of Destiny, introduced a different kind of shared, persistent world game that incorporates RPG, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), and Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) elements into a first-person shooters (FPS) genre, and enables a wide variety of gameplay options, which is evident in the many game modes across Player-versusEnvironment (PvE) and Player-versus-Player (PvP) in Destiny, with the latter gameplay mode being the focus of the current paper
As multi-player online games become more and more popular and more complex, it is crucial to find new ways for analyzing the player behavior in these games, which are capable of taking into account multiple viewpoints on the activity of the player base [2,1,18]
Summary
The social networks in persistent online games play a fundamental role in the user experience and retention of players, and building and maintaining communities in games form an important aspect of the design and maintenance of persistent games. The networks forming between players in online games can be difficult to investigate without the right tracking of player interactions and behavior, and are relatively volatile in terms of constant change as the community in a game evolves. In recent years it has become possible to explore the networks forming between players in online games, thanks to new tracking technologies and business models that have enabled the collection of big data-scale telemetry datasets about player behavior in games. This further augments the investigation of player networks by providing contextual data about the in-game behavior of the players in the networks, for example. The focus lies on a previously largely unexplored type of player network in online games: Competitive Networks; which form
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