On the battle between lag and online gamers

Although online games have been an important Internet activity today, players inevitably suffer from lag from time to time due to the Internet's non-QoS-guaranteed architecture. Here by lag we refer to the phenomena when a game fails to respond to user commands or update the screen in a timely fashion due to long system processing or network delays. Currently, little is known about how game players feel about lag and how they react when encountering lag during game play. In this paper, we present an Internet survey that is designed to understand the following questions: 1) How do players perceive lag, 2) what do players think of the causes of lag, and 3) how do players react to lag. Our results show that game players often struggle with lag, because they are unable to identify the root cause. Therefore, they have to try any combination of possible solutions found on the Internet, blame game companies, or learn to cope. These findings manifest a strong demand for an automatic diagnostic tool that can identify the root cause of lag for gamers.