The effect of latency and network limitations on MMORPGs: a field study of everquest2

ABSTRACT

Networked games are becoming more and more important in the last years. One of the current game evolutions is creating massive virtual environments, so called MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games). Those game types exist for more than 10 years, but the market and the number of products grew incredibly strong in the last two years.With such an evolution comes the need for new techniques to cope with special problem fields such as effects of latency with 200 and more players. Thus understanding and pointing out the new problem fields will help to design fitting solutions for expansions like a mobile MMORPG version.This paper will give a brief introduction into the MMORPG history. Furthermore it will evaluate certain latency problems in a field study of Everquest2, referring to the previous work at "Overviewing Scientific Research for (Mobile) Gaming" and point out possibilities to design MMO(RP)Gs in a mobile content.

REFERENCES

• 1: Internet resource: "The first released MMOG ever was Meridian 59" -- a fantasy setting: for more information refer to http://www.meridian59.com/, (Aug. 2005).
• 2: Internet resource: Detailed market percentages are available at: http://www.game-research.com/. For a complete overview of the MMORPG community refer to http://www.mmorpg.com/, (Aug. 2005).
• 3: For detailed information about the content refer to http://www.everquest2.com.
• 4: Further information about NISTNET is available at http://www-x.antd.nist.gov/nistnet/.Status of 05-10-2005.
• 5: Y.W Bernier. Latency Compensation Methods in Client/Server In-Game Protocol Design and Optimization. In Proceeding of the Game Development Conf., Feb. 2001.
• 6: Jouni Smed, Timo Kaukoranta, Harri Hakonen. Aspects of Networking in Multiplayer Games. Turku Centre for Computer Science, 2002.
• 7: Nicholas Yee. Facets - 5 motivation factors for Why People Play MMORPGs. Internet resource March 2002.
• 8: Lisbeth Klastrup. Interaction forms, agents and tellable events in Everquest. Melbourne DAC 2003.
• 9: Nicholas Ducheneaut, Robert J. Moore, Eric Nickell. Designing for Sociability in Massive Multiplayer Games: an Examination of the Third Places of SWG. Other Players conference, Denmark 6--8 December 2004.
• 10: Cory Ondrejka. Escaping the Gilded Cage - User Created Content and Building the Metaverse. February 2002.
• 11: Richard A. Bartle. Pitfalls of Virtual Property. The Themis Group, April 2004.
• 12: Natha Sheldon, Eric Girard, Seth Borg, Mark Claypool, Emmanuel Agu. The Effect of Latency on User Performance in Warcraft III. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, May 2003.
• 13: Chris Gauthier Dickey, Daniel Zappala, Virginia Lo. A Distributed Architecture for Massive Multiplayer Online Games. University of Oregon, April 2004.
• 14: Yoshihiro Kawahara, Hiroyuki Morikawa, Tomonori Aoyama. A Peer-to-peer message exchange scheme for large scale networked virtual environments. The university of Tokyo, 2004.
• 15: Tom Beigbeder , Rory Coughlan , Corey Lusher , John Plunkett , Emmanuel Agu , Mark Claypool, The effects of loss and latency on user performance in unreal tournament 2003®, Proceedings of 3rd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games, August 30-30, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1016540.1016556]
• 16: James Nichols , Mark Claypool, The effects of latency on online madden NFL football, Proceedings of the 14th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video, June 16-18, 2004, Cork, Ireland [doi>10.1145/1005847.1005879]
• 17: Kieran Mansley , David Scott , Alastair Tse , Anil Madhavapeddy, Feedback, latency, accuracy: exploring tradeoffs in location-aware gaming, Proceedings of 3rd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games, August 30-30, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1016540.1016544]

INDEX TERMS

General Terms:
Documentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
Everquest2, MMORPG, mobile gaming, network games, user study