Review: On the Geographic Distribution of on-line Game Servers and Players

Wu-chang Feng and Wu-chi Feng, "On the geographic distribution of on-line game servers and players," In proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Network and system support for games, pp 173-179, May 2003.

It is established that a large network delay between the on-line game servers and the players affects the playing experience. Therefore it is natural to assume that the distribution of the players is localized to the the nearest game server. This paper analyses the distribution of both the game servers and the players of three first first shooter (FPS) games. The IP addresses of the servers in the world is collected by initiating server queries from a game client. Player distribution is considered from the traces of only one game server. GeoByte geolocationing system is used to find the geographical location of the extracted IP addresses.

The distribution of the servers is concentrated in the northern hemisphere distributed in America, Europe, and east Asia (as anybody can guess). The distribution of the players accessing the one game server in CA, USA is bit surprising because 45% of the players are not from Americas. The authors of the paper discusses few reasons for this behavior: (a) disparity between geographical and network proximity; (b) application delay in servers; (c) broken server selection mechanism; (d) user preference; and (e) overloaded local servers. The paper further analyses the traces to provide the proof for the last reason. The traffic from overseas comes to the server when it is the peak time at places of the clients.