4 ms·

I played semi-professionally at one point in my life. A 20ms difference could be the difference between a head-shot and a miss. I used to work at an ISP and w

by bmurphy1976 8y ago

I played semi-professionally at one point in my life. A 20ms difference could be the difference between a head-shot and a miss. I used to work at an ISP and when I had matches or practice I would haul my computer to work and hook right up to our backbone to get that extra 20ms-40ms advantage. One thing people who never played at this level don't realize is it's not just what you see. Your brain is always running heuristics and your body has muscle memory. You brain is also predicting where things will be and what you need to do next. The crisper and more responsive the game is, the more these things will line up and a quick flick of your wrist will put you in the right location before your eyes can even verify that this has happened. To say you can't see more than 30fps or feel 20ms of latency underestimates how our brains and bodies work. It depends on the game, of course, but in some games it really does matter. It's very hard to simplify things down to a pithy metric. That's the real problem, it's not pseudoscience, it's just very complicated.

jrockway 8y ago
It depends on the game... Overwatch has such generous hitboxes on weapons (other than hitscan) that it doesn't matter if you clicked where they were two frames ago... you still hit their hitbox. Obviously there is benefit to reducing network latency, but it's really about the edge cases (being hooked out of ice block, dying after you translocate). While true that having your video delayed means that the game can't compensate for lag effects, I doubt it matters... if you had 0ms video latency you'd be hooked out of iceblock and die. With the video latency, you were dead before you ice blocked. Either way, you died. In the end, I doubt people are reacting to anything within 20ms. They used information from 100ms ago to decide what to do, decided what to do and when, and then did it. A video delay won't prevent you from doing that. (More Overwatch examples: use Sombra's translocator to not die to the D.va bomb. You only have a few frames of invulnerability, but you have so long to make the decision to do it that even very low rank players can do it 99% of the time. When you switch to having video lag, you will still be able to do it, but you'll have to re-learn how. The latency doesn't matter, the fact that the game changed a little does.)

jrockway 8y ago

It depends on the game... Overwatch has such generous hitboxes on weapons (other than hitscan) that it doesn't matter if you clicked where they were two frames ago... you still hit their hitbox. Obviously there is benefit to reducing network latency, but it's really about the edge cases (being hooked out of ice block, dying after you translocate). While true that having your video delayed means that the game can't compensate for lag effects, I doubt it matters... if you had 0ms video latency you'd be hooked out of iceblock and die. With the video latency, you were dead before you ice blocked. Either way, you died. In the end, I doubt people are reacting to anything within 20ms. They used information from 100ms ago to decide what to do, decided what to do and when, and then did it. A video delay won't prevent you from doing that. (More Overwatch examples: use Sombra's translocator to not die to the D.va bomb. You only have a few frames of invulnerability, but you have so long to make the decision to do it that even very low rank players can do it 99% of the time. When you switch to having video lag, you will still be able to do it, but you'll have to re-learn how. The latency doesn't matter, the fact that the game changed a little does.)