The evaluation of massive multiplayer online role-playing games based on expanded dependency graph

Evaluating massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) before purchasing and operating them is of paramount importance to earn high profits. Dependency graph (DG) is fit for modeling and analysis of the MMORPG as it is relatively easy to understand and conductive to the synthesis between different networks. However, the conventional DG cannot describe how or to what degree events depend on each other. Therefore, we propose an expanded dependency graph (EDG), where logic operations are introduced to describe how events depend on each other, and colored tokens are adopted to represent to what degree events depend on each other. Based on EDG, MMORPG can be evaluated in a quantitative manner using three measure indexes: complexity, sociality, and game balance. Furthermore, the measure chart is also adopted to standardize the three measure indexes and deal with the multi-criteria decision problem. The proposed method is tested with the real word data and experimental results indicate that our method shows competitive performance over other methods.