Although online games have been an important Internet activity today, players inevitably suffer from lag from time to time due to the Internet’s non-QoS-guaranteed architecture. Here by lag we refer to the phenomena when a game fails to respond to user commands or update the screen in a timely fashion due to long system processing or network delays. Currently, little is known about how game players feel about lag and how they react when encountering lag during game play. In this paper, we present an Internet survey that is designed to understand the following questions: 1) How do players perceive lag, 2) what do players think of the causes of lag, and 3) how do players react to lag. Our results show that game players often struggle with lag, because they are unable to identify the root cause. Therefore, they have to try any combination of possible solutions found on the Internet, blame game companies, or learn to cope. These findings manifest a strong demand for an automatic diagnostic tool that can identify the root cause of lag for gamers.

1. On The Battle between Lag and Online Gamers
Po-Han Tseng, Nai-Ching Wang, Ruei-Min Lin, and Kuan-Ta Chen
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica
Presented by Yu-Chun Chang (National Taiwan University)
2011/5/11 CQR 2011 / Yu-Chun Chang 1

2. Outline
• Introduction
• Methodology
• Survey results
• Conclusion
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3. Introduction (1/3)
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Online game server
Internet
LAG ?
Player

4. Introduction (2/3)
• LAG
– When a game fails to respond to users’ commands or
update the screen in a timely fashion
• We want to understand
– How do players perceive lag?
– What do players think of the causes of lag?
– How do players react to lag?
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5. Introduction (3/3)
• Contribution
– We design an Internet survey to know about how game
players feel about lag and how they react when
encountering lag during game play
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6. Outline
• Introduction
• Methodology
• Survey results
• Conclusion
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7. Methodology
• Our questionnaire comprises four sections
1) Player demographics (12 questions)
2) Perceptions of lag (9 questions)
3) Reactions to lag (7 questions)
4) Solutions (5 questions)
• Published on my3q.com
– We also announced it on PTT.cc for 3 weeks
– 229 respondents to the questionnaire
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8. Outline
• Introduction
• Methodology
• Survey results
• Conclusion
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I. Player Demographics
Q1: Age of players Q3-Q4: Game play experience

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I. Player Demographics
Q5: Preference of games
World of Warcraft

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I. Player Demographics
Q7: Game play time
Q6: Game play
frequency
6 PM – 10 PM

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I. Player Demographics
Q9: Internet service provider adopted

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Q9: Host to gateway
access method
Q10: Gateway to
Internet access
method
I. Player Demographics

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Q12: Bandwidth of Internet access
I. Player Demographics

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II. Perceptions of Lag
Q13: Frequency of lag
Q14: Significance
of lag

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Q16: Players’ intuition
about root causes
of lag
Q15: Duration of lag
1.
3.
1. Link bandwidth
2. Game server
3. User’s PC
2.
II. Perceptions of Lag

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II. Perceptions of Lag
Q17: To what degree do players
feel lag is related to the
time of game play?
Q18: To what degree do players
feel lag is related to the
number of avatars in the
screen?

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III. Reactions to Lag
Q15: Reactions to lag

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III. Reactions to Lag
Q23: Interval time
between reattempts
Q27: To what degree do
players think lag is the
main cause to quit an
online game?

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III. Reactions to Lag
Q28: Where or to whom do players usually
complain about their lag problems?

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IV. Solutions to Lag
Q29: Strategies to solve lag
None
Upgrade access link
Upgrade PC

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IV. Solutions to Lag
Q29: How often do players adopt network tools
to detect the root cause of lag?

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IV. Solutions to Lag
Q31–Q32: What kind of tools do players
demand to fight lag?

24. Conclusions
• We present an Internet survey to understand how
players perceive of and react to lag
• Our survey results show that players usually have no
means to fight lag
– They are looking for a diagnostic tool that can infer the
root cause of lag
• Future work
– Develop a diagnostic tool to detect the cause of lag
between client and server
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25. Thank you for your attention!
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