Understanding Gaming Experience in Mobile Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Games

Abstract

Online mobile game (OMG) is booming recently, which has driven user expectations for high-quality game service. Therefore, it is crucial for game operators to understand if and how system factors (i.e. network quality metrics such as delay and mobile phone's rendering performance such as frame rate) affect gaming experience and how to optimize resource allocation to improve it. This paper is a first step towards addressing these problems. Despite the rich literature on multimedia services and Quality of Experience (QoE) measurement, the understanding of gaming experience is limited because the game platform shifts from traditional PC end to the mobile end, which has yet to be explored in depth. Based on a large-scale dataset collected from Honour of Kings, the world's top grossing mobile game, we carry out elaborate studies to explore gaming experience from the aspects of user behavior and game quality. Our key findings are as follows. First, user behavior is mainly limited to the game logic itself, such as I of a game is restricted by game rules. Therefore, it cannot well represent gaming experience. Second, among all system factors, the biggest impact on game quality comes from network performance rather than the frame rate of device, which is different from the influence mode in PC games. Third, some context factors, such as AP/BaseStations used by mobile phones, can have an indirect but huge impact on gaming experience. Based on the above observations, we provide insights that can enhance OMG's system from the perspective of resource allocation and real-time gaming experience monitoring. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to conduct large-scale measurement to study gaming experience of OMGs in the wild. We believe our study is not only crucial for the understanding of gaming experience, but also helpful for game operators to optimize their systems.