ISCA Archive PQS 2016
ISCA Archive PQS 2016

Assessing the Accuracy of Network Estimations in the DOTA 2 Game Client

Matthias Hirth, Fabian Allendorf, Florian Metzger, Christian Schwartz

Online video games and the subjective quality of player interactions with them rely on good network conditions. Almost equally important is a good and timely knowledge of such conditions in order to take proper countermeasures to worsening conditions. To this end, many online video games include components for estimating the current network status. In this paper, we examine the accuracy of those estimations for the popular competitive multiplayer game DOTA 2. Our results show that the game client is capable of performing a good estimation of the delay and packet loss, but only after a rather large initial delay.