Empirical study of subjective quality for Massive Multiplayer Games

Online gaming is a member of the real time interactive multimedia services. This service suffers from all impairments on the networking layer that increase the latency, respectively the responsiveness. The quality of service (QoS) of online gaming is becoming an important issue due to a massive increase of online games (Half-life, War-craft) with a significant player community. The purpose of this project is to investigate the impact of network impairments (delay, jitter) on the perceived QoS. We hereby focus on massively multiplayer online games (MMOG), due to their amount of active users and their popularity. The initial step is to develop a test setup for subjective quality evaluation for MMOG games. The final outcome of this paper is to propose a QoS metric for online gaming.