Observations on game server discovery mechanisms
NetGames '02 Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Network and system support for games
A geographic redirection service for on-line games
MULTIMEDIA '03 Proceedings of the eleventh ACM international conference on Multimedia
On the geographic distribution of on-line game servers and players
NetGames '03 Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Network and system support for games
Vivaldi: a decentralized network coordinate system
Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Networking and Online Games
Dissecting server-discovery traffic patterns generated by multiplayer first person shooter games
NetGames '05 Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Optimising online FPS game server discovery through clustering servers by origin autonomous system
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video
Measurement and estimation of network QoS among peer Xbox 360 game players
PAM'08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Passive and active network measurement
Client-side adaptive search optimisation for online game server discovery
NETWORKING'08 Proceedings of the 7th international IFIP-TC6 networking conference on AdHoc and sensor networks, wireless networks, next generation internet
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Multiplayer online first person shooter games are usually client-server based. This paper reviews networking issues and tradeoffs associated with common techniques used to discover playable game servers. ISPs, game hosting companies and private enthusiasts typically host game servers and publishers host 'master servers'. To seek available game servers clients query the master servers for lists of currently active game servers then probe the list for status information and latency estimates. Slow probing irritates players, whilst probing too quickly congests consumer's links (inflating latency estimates). A game server's inbound probe traffic reveals the topological distributions of likely player populations.