Demystifying the Peeker's Advantage in Multiplayer First-Person Shooter Games

Citation: Michaelides, C., & Bellalta, B. (2026). Demystifying the Peeker's Advantage in Multiplayer First-Person Shooter Games. IEEE Transactions on Games.

We study the peeker's advantage in first-person shooters, a classic problem in multiplayer games. A player, the peeker, who first observes another player, the defender, has a strategic advantage. The peeker has the opportunity to aim and shoot first, as the defender is not aware of the peeker's presence for a short amount of time. Formally, the peeker's advantage is the length of time that the peeker sees the defender without being seen. This is an inherent problem of multiplayer games, where each player runs their own instance of the game and relies on updates from an authoritative game server to get informed about the global game state. In this article, we explore the peeker's advantage with extensive simulations, by varying the system delays, the network delays, and the reaction times of the players. First, we present our multiplayer abstraction that captures the essence of first-person shooters, including client and server logic as well as the exchanged messages. Next, we show that the game frame rate is the most influential factor, while the game server tick rate and network delays have minimal impact. Specifically, we show that by using 120 fps in the game and 60 ticks/s on the game server, the peeker's advantage can be dropped below 100 ms. Finally, using realistic standards-compliant simulations, we show that this advantage is consistent across multiple configurations, both in local area networks and over the Internet.

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