On the Geographic Distribution of On- line Game Servers and Players Wu-chang FengWu-chi Feng Presented By: Abhishek Gupta

Motivation  Understanding the geographic distribution of game servers and players.  Game server placement strategies would enhance user gaming experience. FPS class of games requires network proximity to servers.

Challenges in Enhancing Gamer’s Experience  Games are sensitive to latency and therefore, game servers have to placed geographically and topologically close to the players.  Control over game quality and prevention of cheating.

Contribution  Geographic characterization of game servers for several popular FPS games – Where are the servers located ?  Geographic characterization of the game players for one particular game server – Where are the players?

Methodology  Obtaining server addresses: Obtain server list from centralized registry server. Select server based on round trip latency from client, using ping.

Methodology (contd.)  Obtaining client addresses. Not easy! Needs access to centralized authentication and game servers. Easier to focus on the geographic distribution of players for a particular game.  Deriving geographic locations Use commercial geographic mapping tool.

Evaluation  Longitudinal histogram for Game Servers distribution.

Evaluation (contd.)  Longitudinal CDF of game server distribution.

Evaluation (contd.)  Latitudinal CDF of game servers.

Evaluation (contd.)  Longitudinal histogram for players.

Evaluation (contd.)  Longitude CDF for players. Only 30% of the players are within 10 degree longitude and about 50% players are in North America!

Evaluation (contd.)  Reasons for utilization of game servers by geographically remote users: Disparity between geographic location and network topology. Application server delays dominate network delays. Server selection mechanisms for popular games are broken. The number of players on a server determines desirability over delay. A shortage of servers overseas.

Evaluation (contd.)  Player locations over time – Time of day phenomenon!

Evaluation (contd.)  Player locations over time.

Conclusion.  Results show that game servers are mainly distributed across the northern hemisphere in US, Europe and East Asia.  There is some geographic preference between players and servers.  The dominant factor in the geographic distribution of game players is the time- of-day.

Future Work  Improvements needed in the accuracy of results.  Expansion of characterizations for more complete capture of geographic distributions of servers and players.  Plan to study the evolution of populations over time as gaming applications change.  Determination of global game player populations and their distribution across the world.