Abstract

Thin clients have become increasingly popular in the gaming industry. This architecture alleviates the computational burden on local hardware but is susceptible to latency as it requires round-trip communication from client to server for all player input. To reduce the effects of latency, attribute scaling has the potential to boost player performance. We conducted user studies to determine how different latencies and attribute scaling techniques affect game performance and enjoyability. We found that increases in added latency significantly decrease user performance and enjoyability. Furthermore, increasing attribute scaling significantly increases user performance, indicating that it may be an effective compensation method for latency. Furthermore, we developed a mathematical model to determine how much games should compensate given the latency, difficulty, and desired accuracy.

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