Do players with higher pings (200-250ms) have an "advantage?"
yuckfoo
Join Date: 2012-11-08 Member: 168216Members
Join Date: 2012-11-08 Member: 168216Members
Mainly this question is for marines.
I have heard techno-babble about how servers set players response (or something like that but hey, I could be way off all together) to 100ms.
I've been playing on some servers over-seas with pings from 200-275ms and it just seems like I am ungodly, averaging k/d's @ huge ratios compared to when my ping is around 30-60.
Was wondering if there was some science to this.
I have heard techno-babble about how servers set players response (or something like that but hey, I could be way off all together) to 100ms.
I've been playing on some servers over-seas with pings from 200-275ms and it just seems like I am ungodly, averaging k/d's @ huge ratios compared to when my ping is around 30-60.
Was wondering if there was some science to this.
Comments
edit: i think we can close this ?!
However, 99% of the time, basic FPS skill differences dominate.
I checked out the thread you posted Gamer, I am running @ 60 fps so hopefully I am not warping on the perceived side of the opposition.
So the lagging player is still handicapped. But that is under considerations of a symmetrical FPS. In NS2 it benefits marines probably more than aliens.
I would. Playing marines with ~200 ping is amazing. It's enough lag to keep you from getting bit by skulks but not enough to throw off your ability to track skulks if you know where to shoot. It also allows for glorious interp kills on higher lifeforms where you empty half a rifle mag into them before they know you've even started firing.
Alien with high ping doesn't give you quite the same advantage though.
Also, this is just anecdotal evidence from my experience playing on UK/AUS servers.
In short (and in my case), no, I don't think it's an advantage.
Idk, that's just the way that I experience it I guess. Most of my hours were played on london servers so I could just be better with higher ping because that's how I learned the game.
When a player performs an action that action is sent to the server, where the server confirms it then sends it to everyone else.
All hits are client side hit reg, so if you hit something on your screen it sends it to the server as a hit.
If a marine shoots 10 bullets into a skulk (start of game, 100 dmg it's a kill) the server then gets those messages and kills the skulk, then sends the message to the skulk player that he is dead.
Now, if one player has higher ping than the other, eg. the marine, let's say he has 1000 ping just so you really get what I'm talking about, please realise it works on all pings relatively.
The marine sees the skulk enter a room, he has just received the message that the skulk has moved there from the server, it's 1000ms (1s) after it really happened though. He fires 10 bullets at the skulk, all 10 hit, then he's dead and only "20" popped up. What happened is that the skulk was biting the marine on his screen at the same time the marine saw the skulk enter the room, he gets 3 bites off which sends 75 75 75 to the server. The server gets the 75 75 75 hits BEFORE all 10 bullet hits because the skulk has low ping (60ms) and as such the message arrived way sooner than the bullet messages (1000ms), the server did however get 2 bullet hit messages from the marine before all 3 75s however and registers 20 damage EVEN THOUGH the skulk wasn't anywhere near where the marine was shooting it in "real time" and was in fact half way across the room biting the marine. The server has now received 20 damage from the marine, and 225 damage from the skulk, it sends a message to the marine he is now dead because the server has calculated that he has no health left. The marine doesn't receive the messages for another second though, continues shooting, but all the hit messages are then ignored by the server as it has determined that the player is actually already dead.
The only advantage the marine can get from this is that if he DOESN'T die, eg. a skulk runs THROUGH the room and doesn't bite him, all his hit messages will register as would be normal, but because it's 1 full second late the skulk keeps running around alive (and he IS alive) before the server suddenly kills him because it received registered hits even though it's delivering the message a full second too late.
When we play teams from the US for example ping is always a big issue, and there is a good reason that in tournaments the marine team always gets the ping advantage.
in a high ping scenario:
For marines: it is extremely difficult to get the first shot in on a skulk, the skulk is generally at your feet before you can start to shoot since you are technically getting the information from the server too slowly for the server to accurately predict the skulks movement, this is of course even worse if the alien team has a ping advantage.
You get a lot of scenarios where on your screen you hit the skulk just fine but the server says "nope" because the movement prediction was off by 200ms fx.
For aliens: Playing aliens with a high ping vs marines that have a ping advantage is also very hard but it is a lot easier to get used to it, for aliens it just means that all actions you take, will take a little longer than they normally would, when we play vs US teams for example for our fades we make sure that they get out a lot earlier than they normally would, and you just in general play a lot more "safe"
You get a lot of strange situations where on your screen you are well past a corner but then die from the marine that was shooting you and to you, you were perfectly safe but as the server saw it you had not passed the corner while the marine was shooting you and the damage and death calculations just took longer due to the ping.
I am not an expert on this in any way, but playing with high ping is definitely possible and many players get "used" to it, meaning that they have simply started to perform the tasks with the delay, you see this a lot in games like starcraft for example when players play on the korean server for example they just get used to pressing the button a half a second earlier than they would in a low ping situation.
But I would by no means say that there is any advantage for having high ping.
In some cases players start to "warp" and can be difficult to aim at which fair enough could be considered an advantage, but if a player is warping there are a lot of issues on his end as well.
So again, I am in no way an expert, just talking for general experience.
Aliens are harder to play with high ping. You absolutely cannot stand still in a hiding spot, unless you're in the best hiding spot ever, because it takes time for your movement to register and you'll be a sitting duck for the enemy if you just wait for that marine to come around the corner. And again, I've lost count of how many marines I ought to have killed but didn't because of the ping.
You do get the "advantage" of "killing behind walls" as marines, but it does not compensate for the fact that skulks can get in your face before you even know it. Oh, and you waste more LMG bullets than needed since the kill takes longer to register too.
Thanks to the lag compensation I can still play this game. The servers in my region have been completely empty for weeks and the best I can find are 150-200 ms servers in the US east coast. I'd hate not to be able to join them because someone was complaining of my above average ping when in fact my 14 years of online FPS gaming are being put to good use.
I have no choice. See above.
I don't think this is how it works, or it would be very easy for a hacker to just tell the server he hit every single shot on any alien in his sight without even aiming at them. I know for sure that the client simulates some of the effects of the hit reg, like spilling blood, making hit sounds and updating the health, but I am not sure whether it's the client that tells the server about hit/miss or if the server keeps track of the last several frames of game world simulation to be able to compensate for the player ping by checking his actions against the corresponding time frame. I feel like the latter is quite expensive but a lot safer.
Also today i was able to shoot the head of a stationary skulk in a vent, got skulk noises and blood spatter, and yet the shots were doing no damage. Another mystery as neither of us were moving.
As aliens, it seems that a laggy marine who does a lot of evasive jumps is almost impossible to bite, and not in the sense that I can't track him but that it seems like a perfect 75 bite on my screen yields either no damage or low damage to the marine as he dances around.
I can't prove it but something is definitely 'off' feeling about playing with people who have a 200-300ms ping.
I think this thread is kinda misleading to word the question in static terms of high ping and low ping. Rather the real question is simply how big the ping difference between players is, and who is going faster. It's best to think of the ping/lag compensation situation as comprising of two parts
1) Static low ping advantage
Low ping always has a baseline, unchanging advantage over high ping. This advantage is distance to server and being able to have your packets register before the other player. If you both send the last bite/last bullet to kill packet at the same time irl, yours will reach server first, his will be discarded and he will die instead of you.
2) Dynamic pace/speed advantage (first mover advantage)
Ns2 being lag compensated will always favour the person instigating action over the person reacting to action. The higher the ping difference between players, the greater the 'first mover' advantage. It doesn't matter whether you are the low pinger or the high pinger, the person reacting has the disadvantage of not being able to make effective reactionary movement (because it is too delayed to the opposing players client).
How to have first mover advantage? Be faster than your opponent. This is why high ping difference favours alien play and not marine play, because you are always going much faster as alien (except gorge). That is, fast moving low pinger skulk has first mover advantage on high pinger marine, just as fast moving high pinger skulk has advantage on low pinger marine.
So who has overall advantage?
Because the first mover advantage does not discriminate between who the high pinger or low pinger is, overall high ping differential play will always favour the low pinger when you both play 1 round alien, 1 round marine (due to static low pinger advantage). It can get pretty ridiculous if you are a high pinger marine and have both advantages 1 and 2 stacked against you (dead on the server state before your client bullet hits even make it to the server to register). Low pinger with advantage 2 stacked against him doesn't suffer as much because advantage 1 compensates somewhat.
Also, high pingers have much harder time recieving timely feedback from server, so its hard to bullet count, bite count, or judge hit and runs. You might have first mover advantage, but if you don't kill them with it and instead run away, they have as fair a chance to kill you as if it was low ping vs low ping (the reason for dying behind corners).
So yea, from regularly playing alot of high ping myself, there are definitely advantages if you know how to position yourself well to exploit them (going fast enough from corners or ambushes that first mover advantage > low ping advantage). Sometimes jitter and packetloss that come as a result of routing your packets over longer distances can cause you to spazz out a bit for other players. Most of the time though you are at a disadvantage - everything is in the 'wrong place' so to speak, both environment and every player. As a low pinger, only the high pinging players are in the 'wrong place'.
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I think there are also 'bugs' in the engine where it 'mispredicts' your positions, and interpolates you between them such that you end up teleporting/moving around at a higher speed than you should. I don't really know how it works technically or how to reproduce it, only that the vulnerability hasn't been fixed properly and an unreliable connection from having high ping has the potential to cause it...
Yeah it's not ENTIRELY client side, I was wrong to post that, however the client does send what it believes is a hit to the server and the server checks it, unlike some games where the server checks all hits in "its" world.
I've always wondered, are there gameservers in Iceland so EU and NA can both get equal lag?
The server takes the timestamp for the move, finds out which network updates sent to that client that brackets that time, interpolates between them to find out the exact position and animation state of the player and all other entities around him at the moment the player moved and executes the move on the server.
Effects on players/entities are then immediately applied, and after the next server tick new updates are broadcast to players.
Very much simplified, but that's the general idea.
Exactly because of the lag compensation mechanism. The 300 ms ping skulk is seeing you "in the past", so to speak, so he is actually hitting you when you were back then. Marines killing aliens behind corners are due to that as well. But, as I said before, that's the only "advantage" they have. And, as said above, they cannot be reactionary, as their reactions are delayed by their reflexes + ping.
As for the hitreg, it's not perfect. Sometimes you'll miss when you clearly hit, but sometimes you'll also end up hitting when you clearly missed. Stuff like that rarely happens to me, even with 150ms ping.
Ah, that makes more sense.
On the other hand a very high ping player will have a great disadvantage when playing reactively, such as being the skulk in the example below. A very high ping player may not even have seen the enemy enter the same room at all before enough damage has already been dealt to kill in the low ping players timeline, just dying seemly out of the blue.
What do we learn? Don't play reactively, you need to be dodging before you even knew there's someone aiming at you. But you already knew that, even with low ping times NS2 has high enough latencies combined with high movement speed and quick kill times that must already play like this. This applies far, far more to aliens than marines which less affected because of the whole ranged vs melee dynamic. These are not NS2-specific problems though, it's the least worst solution there is to playing over a unreliable, high latency network like the Internet.
Might as well squeeze in that this is also how you "get shot through walls", which novice players (the word "noob" may even apply) likes to call hacks (in any game). This is damage that has already been dealt catching up with you after travelling over the Internet, being processed and all that good stuff. These ideas together with prediction hides latency for the attacker but the victim still experiences it. Allow me to draw a picture. In mspaint.
That right there is a player, lets say a quick fade, moving past a doorway from left to right with perfect cover on both sides. The shooter tracks the fade all the way past the door way, getting 4 hits and seeing blood for all. I'm sure everyone can agree these are hits and should count as such, if they didn't you'd scream "fail hitreg" or similar. Right! So then we got the victims timeline. Because of all the delays, the victim won't know he got hit until he's, in this example, past half the doorway. Fine. But what is this! I got hit twice through the wall! Yes and no, but most definitely mostly no. It appears that way because of the delay, but the shooter hit while you were still visible. Remember, the server tells you what already happened, you only get to decide what happens when you interact, when other players interact with your character what you get is a replay of what the other player did to you, but without rolling back your current actions (which will replay for other players in the future), so the stuff that happened happened, you just moved before it could be shown to you. Again, the way to apply this knowledge to the game is to avoid being reactive, when moving into an unsecured room you should already be dodging or you may already be dead, you just don't know it yet.
Unfortunately (very) high ping players would be a problem here. Well, not in the "fade quickly stepping past a doorway" example because the time exposed is constant, but lets imagine an onos wreaking havoc while planning on when to get out of the room not to die and lose the game. If everyone has similar, low ping, planning is possible, but a high ping player shooting that onos would make this all very unpredictable when the damage is delayed for an extended time, I'm sure you both imagine and has experienced, requiring much higher margins than the gameplay itself appears to dictate, due to technical limitations (still mostly the Internet, not NS2).
The terrible alternative of optimizing for the user being interacted with rather than the user interacting would solve that particular problem, but create much worse ones. The Unreal engine does or at did this (for very long time, even UT3 did). In it you have to guess where to aim (hint: it's not where the player is on your screen unless standing still), which is somewhere in front of the player or rather in the future, the player may not move forward... where varies depending mostly on the network, which contrary to Unreals idea of netcode, can't be trusted to have near zero or even constant latency. If the player doesn't move in a straight line and the latency is high enough, the way to registering hits shifts from aiming to guesswork.
Yeah, this all makes sense and was basically how I understood it to work already. But it still doesn't change the fact that at least in my experience playing marines is easier with high ping
I've played in some 100+ and it's not pleasant to be hit by Fades when they are 2-3 metres away from you. With the speed at which things move in ns2, low ping is the only way to play.
50-150 = Acceptable
150-250 = Barely Passable
250+ = Bad Bad Bad
Man i want your internet connection, holy crap, I live in Montana and I gotta say, I see tons of 250 during peak hours