Causal Analysis Of The Unsatisfying Experience In Realtime Mobile Multiplayer Games In The Wild

There are anecdotal evidences that realtime mobile multiplayer games (RMMGs), which require realtime interactions, suffer from unsatisfying experience in the wild. This paper presents the first measurement results of such experience based on 12 million real game sessions from a toptier RMMG. We observe that 13% of the game sessions suffer from at least one location resynchronization, and 7.12% have been aborted abnormally before the end of the game. This paper thus proposes ExCause, a general causal analysis framework to systematically analyze historical game session records to 1) obtain context factors that cause unsatisfying RMMG experience, and 2) recommend adjustments with quantified expectation of QoE improvement, by applying the potential outcome framework. The recommendations suggested by ExCause can reduce the number of location resynchronization by 95.1%, from 1.323 to 0.065 on average. Furthermore, ExCause enables us to rectify some misperceptions from previous correlation-based studies.