Effect of Network Quality on Player Departure Behavior in Online Games

Abstract

Abstract-Understanding the impact of network conditions on player satisfaction, which is one of the major concerns of network game designers, is a popular research topic. Of the various ways to gauge user satisfaction, in this paper, we focus on how network quality affects a player's decision to leave a game prematurely. To answer this question, we analyze a 1, 356-million-packet trace from a large commercial MMORPG called ShenZhou Online.We show that both network delay and network loss significantly affect a player's decision to leave a game prematurely. It is feasible to predict whether players will quit prematurely based on the network conditions they experience. The proposed model can determine the relative impact of different types of network impairment. For our traces, the degrees of player intolerance of network delay, delay jitter, client packet loss, and server packet loss are in the proportion of 1:2:4:3 approximately. The model can also be used to make system design decisions. Through simulations, we show that by prioritizing server processing according to the goodness of network conditions, employing de-jitter buffers, or replacing TCP with a more lightweight transport protocol, the probability of premature departure can be significantly reduced. In this way, we demonstrate how our model of players' network experience provides feedback for the design of online games.

Difficulty influence on motivation over time in video games using survival analysis

“…it rate, noted λ(t), is the probability that a player stops playing and never plays again a erwards, in a small interval of time, knowing that he was playing just before. Among many authors, it was used by Chen et al to model the impact of network quality on player departure [4].…”

Design influence on player retention: A method based on time varying survival analysis

“…Survival analysis has already been used in video game analysis. Chen [5] use survival analysis to quantify the effect of network quality on player retention in Online Games. They found that both network delay and network loss have a link with player retention.…”

Consistency aware update schedule in multi-server Distributed Virtual Environments

“…In RPUS, first, Si sends out all the relaying requests of the local avatars to other servers and receives the relaying requests from other servers (lines 1-3). Then, Si tries to relay the update packets to the replicas for all the relaying requests received from other servers (lines [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. After that, Si updates the replicas without QoS of the local avatars maintained by the clients connected to itself according to the available resources (lines 13-17).…”

“…The problem of providing QoS in a DVE system has been already described in many ways. Firstly, some research work has been done on the influences of network quality on consistency and player departure behavior in DVEs [7,14]. It shows the consistency plays an important role in the players' behaviors.…”