Ping estimation in enemy territory

This report analyses the round trip time stimation of the multiplayer game Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It describes the effect of various changes in server side snapshot rates, server side tick rates, as well as different round trip times added on the clients end. Enemy Territory (ET) is a very popular First Person Shooter (FPS) game even though it is quite old. The data that was used was drawn from client computers and an ET Server setup at The Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA). Although this server was private, the game play was real with single and multiple players. We found that round trip times are often over-estimated in ET by as much as 50ms, as well as that the server side tick rates impact heavily on the estimated delay times given to its clients.