Matchmaking in multi-player on-line games: studying user traces to improve the user experience
Abstract
Designing and implementing a quality matchmaking service for Multiplayer Online Games requires an extensive knowl- edge of the habits, behaviors and expectations of the play- ers. Gathering and analyzing traces of real games provides insight on these matters, but game server providers are very protective of such data in order to deter possible reuse by the competition and to prevent cheating. We circumvented this issue by gathering public data from a League of Leg- ends server (information over more than 28 million game sessions). In this paper, we present our database which is freely available online, and we detail the analysis and con- clusions we draw from this data regarding the expected re- quirements for the matchmaking service.