Detecting malicious behaviors in MMORPG by applying motivation theory

As the online game industry has been growing rapidly, more and more malicious activities to gain economic benefits have been reported as well. Game bot is one of the biggest problems in the online game industry. So we proposed a bot detection method based on the ERG theory of motivation for the first time. Most of the previous studies focused on behavior-based detection by monitoring patterns of the specific actions. In this paper, we applied the motivation theory to analyze user behaviors on a real game dataset. The result shows that normal users in the game followed the ERG theory of motivation in the same way as it works in real world. But in the case of game bots, the theory could not be applied because the game bot has specific reasons, unlike normal game users. We applied the ERG theory to users to distinguish game bot users from normal users. We detected the game bot with high accuracy of 99.78% by applying the theory.