Online game bot detection based on party-play log analysis.

Abstract: As online games become popular and the boundary between virtual and real economies blurs, cheating in games has proliferated in volume and method. In this paper, we propose a framework for user behavior analysis for bot detection in online games. Specifically, we focus on party play which reflects the social activities among gamers: in a Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), party play is a major activity that game bots exploit to keep their characters safe and facilitate the acquisition of cyber assets in a fashion very different from that of normal humans. Through a comprehensive statistical analysis of user behaviors in game activity logs, we establish threshold levels for the activities that allow us to identify game bots. Based on this, we also build a knowledge base of detection rules, which are generic. We apply our rule reasoner to AION, a popular online game serviced by NCsoft, Inc., a leading online game company based in Korea. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]