Conclusion, Caveats & Future

• For the specific case of QuakeIII Arena, version 1.17, during mid-2001:

  • Players prefer 'local' servers < 180-200ms away

• During 2001, a new version of QuakeIII was released, and players moved away from v1.17

  • I'm now running trials with latest version 1.30, gathering far more finely grained ping samples

• In the future need to:

  • Quantify player sensitivity to jitter
  • Generalize these results to get hard numbers for Half Life, X-box games, etc....
  • Develop ISP business/tech model for deriving $$ from offering premium gamer support