Game private networks performance: From geolocation to latency to user experience

Online games are interactive competitions by players who compete in a virtual environment. The WTFast's Gamers Private Network (GFN®) is a client/server solution that makes online games faster. It connects online video-game players with a common game service across a wide-area network. Response time, latency and its predictability are keys to GPN® success and runs against the vast complexity of internet-wide systems. We have built an experimental network of virtualized GPN® components so as to carefully measure the statistics of latency for distributed Minecraft games and to do so in a controlled laboratory environment. This has led to a better understanding of the coupling between parameters such as: the number of players, the subset of players that are idle or active, the volume of packets exchanged, the size of packets, latency to and from the game servers, and time-series for most of those parameters. In a new experiment described here, we use traceroute measurements and IP-address geolocations to quantify the intuitive correlation in wide-area GPN® that correlates longer message routes to degraded game experience. Our conclusions are related to connection types for different game styles and validate technologies that aim at reducing latency variability through a better control of message routing. This is another small step towards rational, quantified and service-oriented minimization/stabilization of GPN latency by relating explicitly the choice of connection routes with game experience.