User experience while playing Halo with network delay or loss

We report the results of several experiments that were performed to evaluate the impact that the network path characteristics have on multi-player Xbox games. We did not focus on the technical issues but on the user experience when trying to play under high delay or high packet loss conditions. Both, the subjective impression of the players and the objective performance (number of kills per game) were investigated. We found that for a Round Trip Time of 150 ms the performance decreased by about 50% while the perceived quality was still quite high. For packet loss the results were the opposite the perceived quality of the game play reduced much faster with increased loss then the actual kill rate. Games with over 500 ms delay and 4% packet loss were considered as un-playable.