The recommender system for virtual items in MMORPGs based on a novel collaborative filtering approach

The recommendation system for virtual items in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) has aroused the interest of researchers. Of the many approaches to construct a recommender system, collaborative filtering (CF) has been the most successful one. However, the traditional CFs just lure customers into the purchasing action and overlook customers’ satisfaction, moreover, these techniques always suffer from low accuracy under cold-start conditions. Therefore, a novel collaborative filtering (NCF) method is proposed to identify like-minded customers according to the preference similarity coefficient (PSC), which implies correlation between the similarity of customers’ characteristics and the similarity of customers’ satisfaction level for the product. Furthermore, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to determine the relative importance of each characteristic of the customer and the improved ant colony optimisation (IACO) is adopted to generate the expression of the PSC. The IACO creates solutions using the Markov random walk model, which can accelerate the convergence of algorithm and prevent prematurity. For a target customer whose neighbours can be found, the NCF can predict his satisfaction level towards the suggested products and recommend the acceptable ones. Under cold-start conditions, the NCF will generate the recommendation list by excluding items that other customers prefer.