Identifying MMORPG bots: A traffic analysis approach

MMORPGs have become extremely popular among network gamers. Despite their success, one of MMORPG’s great-est challenges is the increasing use of game bots, i.e., auto-playing game clients. The use of game bots is considered unsportsmanlike and is therefore forbidden. To keep games in order, game police, played by actual human players, of-ten patrol game zones and question suspicious players. This practice, however, is labor-intensive and ineffective. To ad-dress this problem, we analyze the traffic generated by hu-man players vs. game bots and propose solutions to auto-matically identify game bots. Taking Ragnarok Online, one of the most popular MMOGs, as our subject, we study the traffic generated by mainstream game bots and human players. We find that their traffi