Fairness in Multiplayer Network Games

Fairness is one of the key elements for competitive first person multiplayer games. Not only the absolute fairness but especially the perceived fairness is important for a good player experience and therefore a necessity for a successful game. Achieving an accepted level of fairness is not always given, so in this paper we will first go over the key elements of fairness, the basics of networking and why only a client- server model will be able to prevent cheating. Then we will create the basic server-client interaction guidelines used in many currently popular games, look at common problems like “Shot around a Corner” and finally we will look at various other factors that will help to improve the perceived fairness regarding latency problems.