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The effects of latency on online madden NFL football

Published: 16 June 2004 Publication History

Abstract

With growth in interactive network games comes increased importance in a better understanding of the effects of latency on game performance. While previous work has measured the effects of latency on first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, there has been no systematic investigation of the effects of latency on sports games. In this work, we study the effects of latency on online Madden NFL football, one of the most popular online sports games, through a series of carefully designed experiments in which we systematically control latency between players. Our experiments illustrate the mechanisms Madden NFL uses to compensate for latency. Our user studies show there is little impact from latency on user performance in Madden NFL over typical low Internet latencies. However, for latencies higher than 500 ms, there is a significant impact on user performance, degrading performance by almost 30%. Our network measurements show periodic data rates during game-play with significant command aggregation at higher latencies.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      NOSSDAV '04: Proceedings of the 14th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
      June 2004
      168 pages
      ISBN:1581138016
      DOI:10.1145/1005847
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 16 June 2004

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      1. latency compensation
      2. network games

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