4 ms·
One effect some older gamers may have noticed over time – lag has gotten worse. I used to be able to ping 5ms to servers in the Bay Area on my old Pacific Bell
by tumult 16y ago
One effect some older gamers may have noticed over time – lag has gotten worse. I used to be able to ping 5ms to servers in the Bay Area on my old Pacific Bell DSL connection back around 1999/2000. Now I'm lucky to get 50 from Comcast.
It also means that most online action games have come to be built around prediction and latency compensation management. Games feel mushier, and they're easier to cheat (by intentionally lagging your client, etc.) because lots of games no longer use the centralized server model. Good prediction requires a dedicated server to run its own 'master' logic on, so that clients can't cheat. If you saw the paper from Valve recently here on HN, that's how it works.
The reason to not run dedicated servers is that it's cheaper. This is what most Xbox Live and PSN games do – just dumbly pipe data between clients. So it becomes a trust-based peer-to-peer system, except you can't actually trust the other peers. And predictably, the games end up feeling like crap.
Lots of games also have latency in their own local engine. Multiple rendering passes with buffering, physics thread synchronization, and then TVs that buffer the video, interpolate frames, and apply sharpening. The cumulative effect is like a car that's been built up with cost-cutting engineering, loaded down with driving aids, and designed to look good for 11 months. Numb, mushy, and ugly this time next year.
- burgerbrain 16y agoI wonder how far away from your servers you are. Even 50ms from your computer, down the wire, through who knows how many network appliances then onto it's target is pretty damned good if you think about it, and at 5ms it's just nuts. Light will only go about 1500 KM that fast..
- tumult 16y agoI'm in the Bay Area. The servers are in the Bay Area. I don't see why that's unreasonable. People don't know what they're missing now.
- techsupporter 16y agoI think burgerbrain is asking how far you are network wise from the target servers. Comcast, along with most of the other big residential ISPs, is notorious for having bad internal routing. It's possible your previous PacBell DSL connection had better routing to the servers in question, but Comcast doesn't. What does a traceroute look like? My fiber connection at home pings an average of 12ms to my colocated server in the same major city. However, a friend's cable modem connection through Time Warner, just two suburbs over, pings at an average of 43ms. My traceroute? 10 hops. His? 21 hops, and goes by way of Houston.
- burgerbrain 16y agoExactly. Without careful investigation I think it's wrong to assume that larger buffers are what is causing the difference between ping times between two different ISP at different points in time.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jamesaguilar 16y agoI would say the "intentionally lagging your client" thing is only the most minor of problems considering some people use aimbots and wallhacks.
- adamzochowski 16y agoI believe there are two DSL modes (profiles). Interleaved and Fast. Interleaved is typically preferred method, as it is more stable, and provides better checksumming / error correction on noisy lines. Fast has none of this correction/checksumming. But Fast is also 5ms and Interleaves is 50ms. Call your dls provider (?Comcast?) and ask if you can be taken into fast profile.