Client RTT and hop count distributions viewed from an Australian 'Enemy Territory' server

Network game servers experience traffic caused by actual game players and by remote clients imply probing the game server's current status. Game clients probe game servers for information such as the current map and number of current players on the server to enable players to find suitable games. The number of clients that probe a given server is orders of magnitudes higher than the number of eventual players. Network level round trip time (delay, or 'lag') between a client and server is a very important criterion for players when deciding which server to join. Often the round trip time is roughly proportional to hop count. In this paper we document and investigate the distributions of round trip time and hop count for game clients that only probe and clients that actually play on a public game server. We also examine the geographical distributions of both groups. Our data was gathered from a Wolfenstein Enemy Territory server operating in Australia, in late 2005.