The explosive growth of the number of applications based on networked virtual environment technology, both games and virtual communities, shows that these types of applications have become commonplace in a short period of time. However, from a research point of view, the inherent weaknesses in their architectures are quickly exposed. The Architecture for Large-Scale Virtual Interactive Communities (ALVICs) was originally developed to serve as a generic framework to deploy networked virtual environment applications on the Internet. While it has been shown to effectively scale to the numbers originally put forward, our findings have shown that, on a real-life network, such as the Internet, several drawbacks will not be overcome in the near future. It is, therefore, that we have recently started with the development of ALVIC-NG, which, while incorporating the findings from our previous research, makes several improvements on the original version, making it suitable for deployment on the Internet as it exists today.

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The well-established Quality of Service and the relatively recently emerged Quality of Experience research topics are unquestionably linked, yet to date little effort has been invested in the study of their precise correlation and mutual reciprocity. This paper examines the impact of three representative QoSrelated parameters on user QoE in the particular context of location-based multiplayer games played on mobile devices. The choice for this research context is motivated by the rapidly expanding popularity of this application domain. Analysis of the quantitative and qualitative results from an empirical study involving 32 participants confirms that modifications in the performance of the investigated technical parameters does indeed hold implications for the quality of the users' experiences; at the same time, the results clarify the magnitude of these implications. Our findings are valuable as they provide practical insight in the QoS/QoE relationship and can hence aid software developers in delivering high-quality usage experiences to their customers.

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