Online-offline activities and game-playing behaviors of avatars in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game

Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are very popular in China, which provides a potential platform for scientific research. We study the online-offline activities of avatars in an MMORPG to understand their game-playing behavior. The statistical analysis unveils that the active avatars can be classified into three types. The avatars of the first type are owned by game cheaters who go online and offline in preset time intervals with the online duration distributions dominated by pulses. The second type of avatars is characterized by a Weibull distribution in the online durations, which is confirmed by statistical tests. The distributions of online durations of the remaining individual avatars differ from the above two types and cannot be described by a simple form. These findings have potential applications in the game industry.Comment: 6 EPL pages including 10 eps figure

Warped Brane worlds in Critical Gravity

We investigate the brane models in arbitrary dimensional critical gravity presented in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 181302 (2011)]. For the model of the thin branes with codimension one, the Gibbons-Hawking surface term and the junction conditions are derived, with which the analytical solutions for the flat, AdS, and dS branes are obtained at the critical point of the critical gravity. It is found that all these branes are embedded in an AdS$_{n}$ spacetime, but, in general, the effective cosmological constant $\Lambda$ of the AdS$_{n}$ spacetime is not equal to the naked one $\Lambda_0$ in the critical gravity, which can be positive, zero, and negative. Another interesting result is that the brane tension can also be positive, zero, or negative, depending on the symmetry of the thin brane and the values of the parameters of the theory, which is very different from the case in general relativity. It is shown that the mass hierarchy problem can be solved in the braneworld model in the higher-derivative critical gravity. We also study the thick brane model and find analytical and numerical solutions of the flat, AdS, and dS branes. It is find that some branes will have inner structure when some parameters of the theory are larger than their critical values, which may result in resonant KK modes for some bulk matter fields. The flat branes with positive energy density and AdS branes with negative energy density are embedded in an $n$-dimensional AdS spacetime, while the dS branes with positive energy density are embedded in an $n$-dimensional Minkowski one.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, updated version, accepted by EPJ