Competitive gamers, and especially esports gamers, want lower latency to improve their chances of winning. There are mainly two sources of latency - local system latency and network latency. While researchers have studied the effects of both, a direct comparison has not been done, especially on competitive gamers for low-end latencies. This paper assesses the effects of local latency and network latency on experienced Counter-strike: Global Offensive players comparing data from two user studies. Analysis of the results shows that local latency has about a 2x higher impact on player performance (accuracy and score) and Quality of Experience (QoE) than does the same amount of network latency.

Materials:

• Paper: pdf
• OSF preprint link: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/bhxcy
• Slides: pptx
• Presentation: mp4

See also:

• 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. 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), Yokohama, Japan, May 8-13, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/csgo-lag-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/