An experimental estimation of latency sensitivity in multiplayer quake 3

Abstract

Abstract-Quantifying the latency sensitivity of potential customers/players is critical for Internet-based game providers when planning the network placement of their game servers. In early 2001 we placed two Quake 3 servers at different locations on the Internet, and instrumented them to gather median latency information on every player who played over a multimonth period. Comparison of server logfiles showed an active yet distinct player population on each server, and the median latency distributions suggest players actively prefer Quake 3 servers less than 150 to 180 milliseconds from the player's location. Quake 3 is often played as a multiplayer, Internetbased, highly interactive "first person shooter" game. Although Quake 3 is nowhere near as popular as games such as Halflife:CounterStrike, we believe our results provide a useful ballpark indicator of latency sensitivity for this class of highly interactive online games.

Investigating informative performance metrics for a multicore game world server

“…Others include data transmission latency, client-side performance, and also game play context: for example, the affects of latency on player experience have been well-studied (e.g. [11,15,16]). A proper analysis of perceived responsiveness encompasses all these factors, is context dependent, and lies outside the scope of the work presented here.…”

OneClick: A Framework for Measuring Network Quality of Experience

“…We can see that the residual deviance with different average delays is generally concave upwards with a local minimum around 1-2 seconds. This implies that 1) the Poisson regression model fits our data; 2) the variable response delays can be accounted for by an average response delay; and 3) our subjects normally delay their click actions after hearing music with unsatisfactory quality 1 . From the graphs, we observe that a subject's average response delays may change in different tests and, not surprisingly, the average response delays are different for the three subjects.…”

“…Network and game researchers are interested in understanding the effect of poor network quality on network game playing; however, there is currently no standard method for evaluating gamers' network experiences [3]. Some researchers use in-game achievements as objective indices [1,14], for example, the number of kills in shooting games, or the time taken to complete each lap in racing games. However, game scores are highly dependent on the players' skills, the game's design, and the content, so the results are not comparable and generalizable across different games.…”

Peer-to-peer support for massively multiplayer games

“…First person shooter games (such as Quake 3) where the player directly controls the avatar can only tolerate latencies less than 180 milliseconds [3]. Real time strategy games like Warcraft III, on the other hand, can tolerate up to several seconds of network latency [35], because the emphasis is on strategy rather than direct interaction.…”