capnjosh

Well, I surprised myself today with some cool breakthroughs in mapping social networks in Knight Online. I found a great program called Pajek released by some very intelligent folks in Slovenia. I really like these academically-inclined projects, especially when I’m quite interested in the subject for which they are created. Hopefully I can do justice to the rather impressive set of features they have created.

Anyways, here is a picture of a partial social network on one of our server clusters:

Each dot is a character. Each line indicates that the two dots had completed a trade of some sort in the last week. Incidentally, all the loosely-related dots between the tight clusters of dots are gold farmers who have used hack tools to abuse the game.

I’ll be mentioning more over the coming days for sure. This is some pretty exciting stuff. I have some server log technicalities to refine, so the data will become ever more accurate.

Just recently we have begun revisiting our server log file analysis systems for Knight Online. Our players generate a lot of data every day just doing their thing in the game, and until recently it’s been pretty tough to effectively make sense of it all. The game engine is now around 7 years old and it was never intended to handle the number of concurrent players thrown at it, so analysis of log files has presented quite a challenge… until now

Having access to these files has been most exciting, and the latest bit of excitement came today when I took a stab at trying to map out the social network of one of our servers. Lo and behold, it will be quite possible! I set the script up to run in Excel so I could get visual in-process clues as to what was being found. You know, as clunky as VbScript may be, it’s great having it hook in to Excel (and everyone with Excel can use those scripts). Anyways, seeing these patterns emerge in real-time was thrilling. And it presents a whole range of additional tools in the ongoing battle with cheating, hacking, and exploit abuse.

So, in the coming days and weeks I want to figure out how to map out the social network of our game. Youtube has that nifty little feature that lets you see which videos are related to each other (view a video, make it go fullscreen, then look in the bottom left for a little button that looks like 3 circles with lines connecting them). I’m downloading Prefuse at the moment to see what I can do with it as far as visualization goes. I’m planning on doing some crude Excel-based ideas tomorrow too. I’ll be sure to mention progress.

btw, the dynamic creature management system is not dead. It’s still rattling around in my head.