Adaptive Time Delay for Improving Player Experience and Fairness in First-Person Shooter Games with Network Latency

Samin Shahriar Tokey, Ben Boudaoud, Josef Spjut, and Mark Claypool

In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG)

Copenhagen, Denmark

August 10-13, 2026

In a multiplayer networked game, actions for players with higher latencies are received and (potentially) acted upon later than players with lower latencies, leading to unfairness, especially important in competitive games. Time delay is a latency compensation technique that can mitigate this unfairness by adding latency to players with lower latency so that all players experience the same latency. Although this provides equal latency to all players, it unnecessarily degrades the responsiveness for the lower-latency players when the players are not interacting. We propose an adaptive time delay technique that only adds latency to low-latency players when they are interacting with players with higher latency. We conducted three separate user studies assessing player performance and experience with network latency and different compensation techniques. Analysis of the results shows adaptive time delay improves average quality of experience compared to fixed time delay while preserving time delay's fairness.

Materials:

Paper: pdf
Slides: (pending)