Esports gamers, and competitive gamers more broadly, want low network latency to maximize their chances of winning - in general, the lower the network latency, the less time between a player's action and the intended outcome. But how much small reductions in network latency benefit competitive players is not known. This paper presents results from a 25-person user study that evaluates the impact of network latency on experienced Counter-strike: Global Offensive players. Analysis of the results shows pronounced benefits to player performance (accuracy and score) for even small reductions in network latency, with subjective opinions on Quality of Experience (QoE) following suit. Latency compensation - a software technique to mitigate the effects of latency - significantly improves player performance and QoE.

Materials:

• Paper: pdf
• Presentation slides: pptx
• Presentation video: mp4
• Surveys:
  • Screener
  • Demographics
  • In-game

See also:

• Shengmei Liu, Atsuo Kuwahara, James Scovell, Jamie Sherman, and Mark Claypool. Lower is Better? The Effects of Local Latencies on Competitive First-Person Shooter Game Players, In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Virtual Conference, May 8-13, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/csgo-lag-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/