Unveiling a Socio-Economic System in a Virtual World

Predicting content consumption from content-to-content relationships

“…The structural properties (e.g., degree distribution and average path length) of various social networks such as movie actor networks [17], scientific collaboration networks [18], and human sexual networks [34] have received great attention. As online social networks have become popular, many researchers seek to examine user behaviors in and structural patterns of various online social networks such as Twitter [35,36], Facebook [37,38], Flicker [39,40], Second Life [41], and Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) [42,43]. While these studies have mostly focused on relations of people [35,36,37,38,39,40,44] in online social networks (OSNs), avatars [41] in a virtual world, or players in an MMORPG [42,43] (i.e., a vertex in its network is a person, avatar, or player, respectively), we focus on relations of contents (i.e., a vertex in its network is a content), which are not human beings but information or objects.…”

EasySM: A Data-Driven Intelligent Decision Support System for Server Merge

“…In MMORPGs, especially for the large-scale ones, multiple game servers are deployed to divide massive players for ensuring load balance and facilitating server expansion. These game servers are actually independent social and economic virtual worlds (Chun et al 2018), which are usually born extremely prosper, gradually become stable, and decline and fall with the leaving players. To maintain the healthy ecology of game servers, increase game activity and improve the players' game experience, a fundamental and common strategy is to merge the servers with fewer players, which have been proven to be effective in real-world applications.…”