Latency can degrade the performance and quality of experience for online games. While the effects of latency have been studied, what is less well known are the limits for perception and tolerance that players have for online games. This paper presents the results of a survey analyzing latency perceptions for over 240 users and their more than 550 games. Generally, users claim they notice latencies as low as 85 milliseconds, but can tolerate about 600 milliseconds of latency. These values vary considerably from individual to individual and from genre to genre. Users find network issues relatively infrequent, but when they do occur, users feel it has a big impact on competitive games.

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