|
Lower is Better? The Effects of Local Latencies on Competitive First-Person Shooter Game Players |
Shengmei Liu, Atsuo Kuwahara, James Scovell, Jamie Sherman, and Mark Claypool
Video game play is among the most popular forms of entertainment in the world and eSports is a multi-billion dollar industry. Esports gamers, and competitive gamers more broadly, want fast game systems to maximize their chances of winning. In general, the faster the game system, the lower the latency between a player's action and the intended outcome. But how much small reductions in local latencies benefit competitive players is not known. This paper presents results from a 43-person user study that evaluates the impact of system latencies for high-end gaming systems (below 125 ms) on experienced Counter-strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) players. Analysis of the results show pronounced benefits to CS:GO player performance (accuracy and score) for even small reductions in latency, with subjective opinions on Quality of Experience following suit.
Materials:
See also:
Shengmei Liu and Mark Claypool. EvLag - A Tool for Monitoring and Lagging Linux Input Devices, In Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), Istanbul, Turkey, September 28 - October 1, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/evlag/
Shengmei Liu, Atsuo Kuwahara, James Scovell, Jamie Sherman, and Mark Claypool. The Effects of Network Latency on Competitive First-Person Shooter Game Players, In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX), Virtual Conference, June 14-17, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/csgo-net-21/
Shengmei Liu, Atsuo Kuwahara, James Scovell, Jamie Sherman, and Mark Claypool. Comparing the Effects of Network Latency versus Local Latency on Competitive First Person Shooter Game Players, In Proceedings of the ACM Esports and High Performance HCI Workshop (EHPHCI), Virtual Conference, May 8, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/net-local-21/
Tom Beigbeder, Rory Coughlan, Corey Lusher, John Plunkett, Emmanuel Agu, and Mark Claypool. The Effects of Loss and Latency on User Performance in Unreal Tournament 2003, In Proceedings of ACM Network and System Support for Games Workshop (NetGames), Portland, Oregon, USA, September 2004. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/ut2003/