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How Fast Too Slow? A Study Of Quake Pings
Jonathan Lennox writes: "Grenville Armitage has published an analysis of ping times of clients connecting to his Quake III Arena server. His conclusion is that 150 milliseconds is the limit that people find tolerable, and says this may have interesting implications for Internet Quality of Service research."
An interesting study might have been the average score for each ping, and seeing where the dropoff area was, rather than just people who quit or never joined.
Now why can't someone do this study on framerate and settle THAT argument? :P
As far as the infrastructure goes, Maui supercomputing center is on the order of that 25.0, too, so sub-150 ping times are definitely quite reachable, if the right hardware is thrown at it. 150 ms is a tenth of the way to the Moon!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
This led me to believe that there's a zone you can get into if you play log enough, like a blindfolded ninja, where you're kicking ass regardless of your handicap.
It's all about knowing where your opponent will be.
I've got cable now, so I'm sucking barrel a lot more than I used to. Maybe I should go back to dial-up...
-- The unsig...
AT&T through Bell Labs did some research into a similar subject. They found that the suite spot for interactivity for voice conversations was no more than a 150 msec delay. Any more than that and you end up having halting conversations, stalls in discussion, misunderstandings, etc.
This is no different.
Interactivity is all about latency- and 200 msec is 1/5 of a second to put things in perspective. Try typing something with that sort of latency sometime- you'll find it unpleasant if you touch type.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Ping times determine the latency of a given connection. Latency is the time that it takes to get one response from a server to a client upon the client's request. Bandwidth affects latency- and is just about one of the only things you can do to impact it. Switches insert latency. Routers insert latency. Modems insert latency. Heavy traffic inserts latency. Once you get latency, you can never rid yourself of it without major changes to your infrastructure. To put this all in perspective: The average latency without heavy traffic losses for a xDSL node to the frame relay at the DSLAM is something like 5-15 msec. The average latency for a Cable node to a border router is something about 30-50 msec on an unloaded segment. The average latency for a dialup modem (of ANY speed) is 250 msec- about 1/4 of a second. The average latency for an 100-base-T adapter is 1-3 msec. The average router latency is something like 2-5 msec. The latency on frame relay can be a couple of msec if it's not loaded to hundreds of msec as it gives higher priority packets credence under load. Each one of these things add up- and fast. And these don't go away unless you rip them out for faster equipment- adding bandwidth doesn't make those parts of the latency go away. That "speed of light" ping time you referred to just went "poof" because it was ate by the intervening hardware.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Not being a Q3A player (I won't buy a copy until they remove the copy control measures), I can't speak directly to Q3A latency in general or his server in particular. However, having been a QuakeWorld addict for several years now, I have several opinions on what contributes to overall quality of game play.
First off, let me repeat as others have above that being an LPB (Low-Ping Bastard) does not assure you victory against all comers. I have been well and truly thorked by players sporting 200+ pings. I am also a decisively mediocre player.
While round-trip time to the server ("ping") is important, I find the game's rate to be just as important. rate is the amount of bandwidth your client will consume, and defaults to 2500 (bytes per second) for QuakeWorld. This limits how much game state can be updated at any given time. Lower rates mean less game state data and reduced "fluidity" of game play. So even if your ping is <20ms, a rate of 2500 gives you incredibly choppy updates. Thus, if you have a high-bandwidth connection (DSL, cable modem, OC3), the first thing you should do is crank your rate. I keep mine set at 8000, which gives me much smoother, much more fluid display. I could set my rate to 10000 since I have high-bandwidth SDSL, but I keep it down a bit as a courtesy to server operators so as not take more bandwidth from the server than I need.
Your rate setting should not exceed the total bandwidth available on your net connection. Thus, setting your rate to 6000 on a 56k modem will actually make things worse. Games with the rate setting include Quake, QuakeWorld, Quake2, Quake-3 Arena, HalfLife, CounterStrike, and all other Quake engine-derived games. Non-Quake engine-derived games also have this kind of setting, but they all call it something else.
Another big source of latency can be your ISP and their Quality Of Service metric. I used to have 416K SDSL through Best/Verio before Northpoint cratered. I have since switched to Speakeasy 1.1M SDSL, who partners with Covad. With Best/Verio, the best pings I saw were in the 20-25 ms range. Occasionally I would get an 18. When I switched to Speakeasy, I naturally assumed that the higher bandwidth would yield even lower pings. However, this has not happened. After some study with traceroute, it's my suspicion that Speakeasy's routers are either overloaded or configured sub-optimally. I posted my thumbnail analysis to Speakeasy's discussion fora (mine's the last post in the thread), but haven't received any response yet.
Another way the network can hose your gameplay is by dropping packets. Speakeasy seems a little more willing to drop the odd packet than was Best/Verio. However, Best/Verio had a router in their network that would occasionally go apesh*t and drop all packets for about 90 seconds, which is long enough to get you disconnected from any server.
Games seem particularly vulnerable to dropped packets. QuakeWorld is the only game that seems to handle this issue robustly, patiently waiting to re-sync with the server. Nearly every other network game I've played -- Quake2, Unreal Tournament, HalfLife -- will never re-synchronize, and you have to reconnect. Serious Sam is especially bad in this regard (I'm willing to cut Croteam some slack since this is their first product, but I hope they fix it soon).
BTW, most of the Quake engine-based games have a little network diagnostic tool called netgraph, which shows you a realtime scrolling graph of your network latency, including dropped packets, corrupted packets, and overflow packets. When the game play starts to suck, you can pop this up and get an idea of what the cause is.
Finally, if there are any FPS gods in the SF Bay Area who would like to help me graduate from frustratingly mediocre player to good-enough-not-to-embarrass-myself player, I'd appreciate hearing from you.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
well in general (ever since the days of standard Q1 tourneys) 150 was the standard cut off for HPB/LPB. Granted, 150 in Q3 is different than 150 in Q1, but the same idea applies.
I don't believe that ping should be the sole basis of your designation. I may have a *somewhat* steady 95 ping, but it suddenly will jump to 1500 in a single ping, 500 at the next, and 90 at the next.. Now. When I am playing this icons me and I am toast (especially when fighting). The ping never shows this, but you can see it...
When I was a 56k HPB at 185 ping I had a better connection for Quake than I do w/my 768/128k DSL from Verizon.
150 is not tolerable. I would say that 125 would be closer to HPB/LPB IMHO.
I don't think that's quite the case. Both sides estimate the RTT (Round Trip Time) on the link, and then adjust the window according to the RTT. The problem you describe comes into play on much higher bandwidth connections with much higher latencies. This page describes the problem reasonably well, although it appears to be a little dated.
By default, TCP offers a maximum window of 64K bytes (which is 512K bits). At 4Mbit/sec, this takes 125ms worth of time to transmit. So, basically, if your RTT is about 125ms or less, you should see 4Mbit/sec transfers. For TCP's maximum window size to limit you to 30KB/sec, your RTT would need to be ~17000ms. I think it's much more likely that your network card's driver is hosed so thqt you're losing ACKs and having to wait for TCP to retransmit.
So what sort of latency are you seeing to kernel.org? I'm seeing 90-100ms. I doubt you're seeing 17000ms.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
However, here's the thing I despise. I HATE HATE HATE when someone says "You're only good because of your ping," which basically means that if you're an LPB and you're winning, you must suck, and you're just winning because of your connection. It's just not true - I've had my ass whupped by plenty of modem users, and I've schooled many of my fellow LPB's.
It doesn't matter if you're a pro or if you're just some kid with a cable modem - I don't care how good or bad you are, as long as you don't say stupid shit like that.
--
PHB's would love you to think that the internet is used primarily for business email (upper management email tends to be MORE important btw. even if it is to schedule the wife's baby shower) and for people surfing corporate sites for *valuable* marketing information.
As if that requires any real bandwidth or requires low latency/packet loss/jitter.
99% of the Internet is porn and games. Porn doesn't require low latency, low jitter or low packet loss, and can be safely QoS'ed into the "available bandwith" slot along with Mr. CEO's VITALLY IMPORTANT email to his golfing pals.
The only thing left is games and VoIP.
The latter is strictly CBR.
This leaves GAMES.
Nobody wants to admit this. It is the Internet's dirty little secret that when a company complains to an ISP about its shitty latency and packet loss rates, it is NOT because Mr. PHB can't check his stock portfolio (after all, he can do this over a modem with 20%+ packet loss and a ping of 500 ms). It is because somebody in the IT staff just got fragged by an LPB.
Ping times never measured speed... and even in the allmighty highly-developed US Internet, it's quite common for a cable user in one place to be unable to play a proper game of quake with someone elsewhere in the US, due to high latency.
Ping times and throughput are related, but not directly.
Also, your speed of light theory is not quite correct. The primary source of latency is buffering through network devices (routers, switches, etc). The transmission delay is a secondary source.
There's nothing new here which hasn't been considered for years in the haptics research community (haptics == feel/touch). Basically it comes down to our neurological wiring ... we've trained our brain to accept a certain combination of inputs occuring within a certain time-threshold to be "simulatenous" or help us guage our sense of space/distance. This impacts our motor coordination (close your eyes, stretch out your arm, can you guess how far away it is?). Why can't we hear underwater? Because our ears are tuned to the directional differential in sound reaching separate ears based on the permeability of air. Underwater we don't have the software/(wetware :-)?) to recalibrate so it appears diffuse and non-directional. Motion sickness where the sight of moving objects is in disequilibrium with our inner ear balance is another example. Psychological experiments (your research dollars at work :-)) show that people can tickle themselves if them interpose a variable delay between anticipation (e.g. pushing a button on a feater machine) and the sensation.
Quake is just another domain whether eye-hand coordination is important enough that any perceptual delay seriously screws up our processing unit. Research in graphics, especially VR, indicate that 0.1 delay is esseential for interactivity. Quake as a wanna-be VR experience is starting to hit these issues.
I predict a new wave of jargon including
- Quake-second (fraction of second delay to get fragged)
- Java-minute (amount of compilation needed to fetch/drink can of coke)
- Cray-hour (amount of CPU needed to solve a problem over a lunch break)
LL
It would be even nicer if you could vary any or all of the following independantly and get the results:
i) Packet loss
ii) Ping as reported by the client (while holding the actual packet delay constant)
iii) Actual packet delay (while holding the ping reported by the client constant)
The second and third options may not be possible - it involves delaying specific packets and not others.
Also, to get a good feel you should also be measuring the performance of the players (ie does a low ping actually correlate with the number of frags), and by selectively delaying certain players you should be able to remove the skew given by the fact that better players will be willing to pay for a better connection.
Further studies could involve examining correlation between the length of time people spend on your server compared to their ping and packet loss (again selectively varied to avoid the skew mentioned above).
Many of these studies would have to be very carefully done to avoid any external factors. For example, showing that better players have low ping times doesn't mean that a low ping helps you play - it may just mean that the better players have DSL because they spend a lot of time on the net, while casual players are more likely to have a modem.
Getting accurate stats and results is a difficult subject - far more difficult than presented in the original report, which does nothing more than profile the internet connections of the players on his Quake server.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
I don't follow how he got the measure of 150ms as what people prefer. What the data really shows is that most people who connected to his quake server had a ping time of under 150ms (which actually covers most of the US from the plots he drew).
Let's think about this a little more:
i) He's on a T1 and possibly advertises the fact.
ii) Serious MP Quake players will have a fast connection (DSL/Cable) and not a modem.
iii) Quake players will *choose* the lowest ping because it seems like a good idea - they won't reject a server over 150ms, just prefer one below it.
Looking at the results, the best he can say is that most people that play on his server are from the US, which for the most part keeps their ping under 150ms. You can't draw any assumptions about what people "prefer" from that data.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Based on analysis of a QuakeIII server over two months in early 2001, first person shooter (FPS) game players strongly prefer servers that are within 150 milliseconds of the player's attachment point to the Internet. Or put another way, if you are planning on hosting a for-fee FPS server service, you should forget about trying to get customers who are more than 150 milliseconds away from your servers. Sections of the Internet more than 150 milliseconds away will provide a minimal source of regular players (and hence minimal revenue).
I fail to see how this indicates some kind of acceptable limit. A similar study done 2 years ago might have reached exactly the same kind of conclusion for 200 msec. Within a year, it might yield 100 msec.
All this tells us is that most players succeed at getting 150msec pings if they can. It doesn't tell us whether they find this number satisfying. If they were unable to play at 150, they might very well be happy playing at 200 or 250.
So this doesn't tell a potential service provider anything beyond the current status of the internet's average ping times. And such data will be useless in a year.
What would demonstrate his point would be players who didn't know what their ping was, and were able to switch between servers with known pings in a controlled situation (50/100/150/200... for example). One could then watch where the players end up, if you saw no difference between the 50 and 100 ping servers, you could *then* conclude that players were satisfied with 100 and saw no need to try to get to 50.
You're absolutely right. A better experiment would involve manipulating ping times or other network factors (while managing to keep players blind to their experimental condition) and measuring things like satisfaction, score, etc.
Interestingly, even if you can't tell that you've got a bad connection you may show physiological signs of stress. Check out this cool paper which looks at the effects of frame rate (in video conferencing) on physiological symptoms such as heart rate and palm sweat. Even when people didn't know that the frame rate was reduced, they showed signs of stress.
That being said, I think this was a cool use of available data, with implications about judgments and preferences rather than about performance.
The thing is... A game with robustly coded prediction (such as Q3) can do reasonably well with times up to 300ms. The problem is that as your ping gets above 150ms, you get a lot more packet loss as well. And when your packet loss spikes, prediction is MUCH harder. If I were paying for a gaming oriented ISP, I would put guaranteed throughput above low ping on my priority list.
Of course, games whose prediction engines are notably worse (*ahem*UnrealTournament*ahem*) will suffer both from packet loss and high ping.
-Ted
Why didn't they just ask a few gamers?
Here is what I found when I used to play Quake 1.
< 15 ms = smooth as glass!
< 75 ms = good
< 150 ms = tolerable
> 150 ms = forgot it
> Thank you :)
:)
;-)
t ure04/Slide22.html
u rces/Shading/21.html
n gApplet.htm
You're welcome
> All these things I had been pondering before, but it's very hard to do a web search on "color depth" or "frame rates" and get useful results
Aye, you won't find the answers unless you knew what you were looking for, but if you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn't need to look. Or something like that
You can see an example of "Mach Banding" here
http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/classes/6.837/F00/Lec
This page shows how our eye percieves Mach Banding
http://www.loria.fr/~holzschu/cours/HTML/ICG/Reso
And this applet lets you try it out:
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram/ArtAndVision/MachBandi
Cheers
> The human eye can only recognize a color depth of X, where X is less than current standard "true-color" depths. Yet we still have 32 bit color. Why?
:-)
Short anwer:
Where's the COLOR faq when you need it?
Seriously,
Gamma ties into this, which I'll ignore, since it a different problem, but the short answer is: you want as many colors as possible when you need to interpolate between any given 2. e.g. a high gradient.
At 32 bit color, with 8 bits per channel (e.g. 3 channels = red, green, blue) that gives us 256 levels for primary gradients. (Less for non-primary colors.)
32 bit is still too low, though. Ideally we should have 16-bit per channel (i.e. 48 bit color) since our eye is more sensitive to greens, and 256 shades isn't quite enough.
So it's not about TOTAL colors, but about the NUMBER of color steps BETWEEN colors.
Blending, or "overlaying" transparent textures is another reason high bit depths matter. If you overlay 8 transparent objects in 16-bit color, you get [bad] artifacts. You can see this on the older Voodoo cards, when you had transparent smoke.
And finally, memory access if MUCH faster if memory is aligned on a power of 2. 24 is not a power of 2, while 32 is. Memory controllers are slower if they have to access memory on odd alignment. There was a paper few years ago paper showing you a "wierd" memory touching walk where instead of doing
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++ )
block[i] = c;
it would be faster to do
block[i+0] = c;
block[i+2] = c;
block[i+1] = c;
block[i+3] = c;
> will having our color depth set to 32bpp instead of 24 make a difference,
Aside from the major speed difference, visually no, because the last 8 bits in 32bit color are usually used for alpha (the level of opacity)
> So the question is, even though you can only see one third of those 210 frames per second, does that make your playing more enjoyable or better?
It's an expontential curve of decreasing returns.
i.e. double the frame rate from 10 to 20, is MUCH more noticable then the double jump from 30 to 60.
But there are a few reasons you want > 100 hz frame rates.
a) The more people that are on screen, the lower the frame-rate. You want a high frame rate so when the action gets "thick and heavy" your frame rate still is above 60.
b) I find a monitor with 100 hz to be rock solid and easy on the eyes. At lower frequence (like 60) Hz I get a head ache (probably because the way our body clock is tied to 60 hz)
> Similarly, does looking at a 48bpp image make you happier than looking at a 24bpp image,
You get less "Mach banding" with a higher bit depth.
Again, this is another example expontential curve of decreasing returns. 48 bpp is "very good". 24 bpp is "good enough"
Hope this helps.
Wasn't "improved networking code" one of the main selling points of Q3? I seem to remember Carmack saying that ping would matter less. I guess he changed his mind somewhere along the line... because Q3 is almost always won by the lpb.
In Q1 matador I found that 250 was pretty playable as long as the local lpb's didn't have quad lightning + res rune. I was consistently ranked in the top ten Q1 matador players at the CLQ, on a 56k; I didn't get much better when I moved to a cable modem, except that now people called me an LPB bot instead of just a bot. No one bothered to consider the idea that strategy might be more important than ping.
PL was the real killer; a 75 ping with a 15% pl was worse than a 250/0 pl. In Q1.
In Q3 I can't play with a ping over 90; i get hit with rockets and then hear them fire, or I'll get hit with a rail shot and then see the doors I was hiding behind open. Not to mention the fact that people with low pings move 50% faster and strafe (or jump) circles around 100 ping "hpb's" in Q3.
Sigh... I guess it doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things, but I sure miss the old Q1 days.
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I just thought I'd interject something that someone else may be able to twist relevence out of. The human body can time actions much more finely than the average error in neuron firing time. That is, if sending a pulse down your arm to release the baseball takes 25 +/- 5 ms, a person may very well be able to release the ball at some point with accuracy of +/- 1 ms. This is because we don't just use a single neuron firing to do the release, but several, and release when a threshhold is reached (adding independent variables reduces the variance).
And, of course, the idea of actually waiting until you hear from your arm "I'm in the right position" to send the "release now" command is just way too slow. Like hundreds of milliseconds.
I think there's something here about us being able to cope with a wide variety of delays, so long as they are consistent. Designing a game? It may be worth slowing down the average response time to half, if it reduces the variability of the response time.
In fact, that applies to designing pretty much anything.
Now we can properly categorize people regardless of their ISP or method of connecting to the Internet. We have a number. If you are less than 150, you're an LPB. Otherwise, you're just a p1ngk1dd13.
It's kinda like penis length, really. It doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things, but it's nice to have a number to compare yourself to.
Got Rhinos?
Ping times no longer measure network speed except in very highly congested networks. For the past 5 years networks have been fast enough that the largest contributor to round-trip times is simply the speed of light. (in a fiber-optic cable, or the speed of an electronic signal down a copper wire, either way about 2/3 c).
High ping times making games unplayable mean that north americans will never enjoy playing against australians, but it really has very little to do with the quality or cost of their network connections.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I can not really understand the point of the article. As he states player choose the first server that has activity at lowest ping. Often that is within 150ms. Thats more of a fact than preferenace of ping time.
Not always the case. I've switched ISPs twice as a result of high latency. My beef is that using remote editors through Telnet and SSH is virtually impossible when it takes a second or more for each keystroke to show up on the screen.
Now did I type seven backspaces or eight? The cursor has stopped moving; is that all, or are there more cursor commands in the pipe?
--
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
I figure a lot of it has to do with a) what we are used to. And b) how fast we are as people.
:)
If you play at a lan party all weekend, and go home to your 80 ping, you swear you're playing in mud. Your rails are off, everything feels Wonky. And yet you may, if you're like me, remember a time where you were Completely comfortable living inside of a 250 ping. 'Getting inside of your lag' we'd say. And after 6 or 8 hours playing quake at 250 ping, eveything in real life seemed a little off, like it would be ok if you could adjust the latency a little
The other thing is, some people are just slower than others. If you're kinda slow, then you might not notice the difference between 150 and 200ms, simply becasue your body doesn't work like that. On the other hand, i know some squirril-people that may be able to detect network latency differences within a few ms no problem.
So i dunno. I guess the article is talking about a law of averages, but i think there is a lot more to consider.
If your card is rendering 200fps you may never see most of the frames, but the important thing is that none of the slow frames takes more than 1/60th of a second to render.
I agree with this post. But another technique is that if you know you have a high-poly or a high-overdraw scene to render, you can render it at a lower quality (drop from 1280 to 640 pixels across, or turn off full-scene anti-aliasing, or decrease light map res or mip-map bias, or do several other tricks). The eye can't see as much detail in a quickly moving scene as it can in a still scene.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I guess my avian carrier network just isn't fast enough!
~$ ping -i 450 10.0.3.1
PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms
And yes, you are correct: qw==strategy q3==ping/aim. Again, check out Promode for an entirely different way of playing q3.
-Elendale
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
Packet loss is *Infinitely* worse than a little latency! I don't play Q3 (slow comp) but I'm a Counterstrike addict, and I can't count the number of times when I've clicked the mouse button and no bullets came! That's packet loss for ya - the packet saying "fire" just... vanishes. And in a one-shot, one-kill game like CS, that's a killer - literally. Since it seems to happen a lot during comp-heavy times (ie. large firefights) it's especially bad. But I guess it's an accurate simulation of your gun jamming :-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
I think what you're TRYING to say, in your strange, 1337 way, is that a study comparing latency to game-success (i.e., score, frags, etc.) would be interesting.
I have to agree, it WOULD be interesting to see what sorts of correlations pop up. I have suspicions that you are correct when you state that the amount of "suckage" on online games has gone up. Think about it - the early online games required 1.)awareness of the Internet 2.)an Internet connection 3.)some technical skill or interest to adopt the game itself. In other words, persons with more gaming experience (computer geeks) tended to play more, thus, you had a higher percentage of better players in your game. Of course, with the current proliferation of higher-bandwidth Internet connections, plus the overall increase in gaming accessibility, you have more non-proficient players (suckage).
Of course, this doesn't really account for me. I've been a gamer since the 70's, have enormous amounts of bandwidth (software developer...I get to write it off...nyah nyah), and I still suck ass on Tribes 2.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
me slashdot reader. mozilla too slow. slashdot too slow. mozilla + slashdot really slow. not fast.
all your fast are belong to us.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Aside from the packet loss factor, I don't think ping is necessarily the most important factor in internet game lag. Yes, it is important, but how a given game _handles_ that lag is what makes the difference.
As an example, take the original Tribes. I used to play that game on 56k with a ping of 500-800 and I never even felt it. Conversly, now on cable, I get pings of 50-150 in Quake 3 and UT, and it still sucks pretty badly. Tribes works fine, as always, and Tribes 2 does as well.
For the modem performance, consider that I live in one of the worst parts of the US for modem access - New Mexico. Minimum pings of 300ms outside of games, numerous hops just to get to the hub 1000 miles away in San Francisco, max downloads of 2.2k/sec etc. and you'll see I'm a good candidate for telling you how bad modem can really be.
Yes, ping and packet loss have a noticeable effect on gameplay, obviously. However, I think the truly good games are the ones that can cope with it, and not make you feel like you wasted $50 simply because you can't afford a T1 like the game developers have.
Jacobson, V. 1990a. "Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links," RFC 1144, 43 Pages (Feb.). Describes CSLIP, a version of SLIP with the TCP and IP headers compressed.
*rambles on for a while while riding backwards on a horse...*
You can't have pi apples, but you can have apple pi!
Here in Fiartfax, Va, I get horrible service from road runner cable modem, right now things are the best it ever has beem, but my ping time to the very first hop is 30-60, and its 100+ before it leaves their network, and thats not during prime time.
games need sub 150, but to be competitive you need to be with in say 50-75 as the people your playing against.
bandwith and packet loss are anotehr issue, but yet another is the fact some networks basicaly through away UDP packets. . . .
games that sinc everyone up 200-150 is ok, games where ping matters, >100. And the leet players sub 20's.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
All of these factors come into play. I used to be real into Kingpin (game/grfx wise between Q2 and q3) multiplayer and a lot of what is said is true: A) you get used to HPB/LPB's (or being one) B) Suckage/llamas'ness shows thru regardless of ping. My best laff was this: Kingpin, 8bit color, P200 64M of memory, 8M voodoo2 with a 150'ish ping. I was doing so well with 2 other players I suggested they gang up and "hunt me". After they had had enough of a beating, one of them asked my system specs thinking I was running a screaming rig. His partner just let out with a "BWAhhhahahahah, you're kidding, right?" He told his buddy it was funny, seeing as he was running "A dualie 650, NT with the latest directX and a TNT2 and smp enabled on the game and STILL could not beat me with help"... The guy's reply to his bud, was STFU. Worst part of all this was I considered myself an average player. Players that could make me cry kept telling me to get a better rig seeing as what I could do on a dinky p200. Heh, I wish. I still got that p200 (i think it is on its 6th or 7th year...oye).
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
No matter what my ping time is, I still keep blowing my stupid self up with the rocket launcher. :(
The more interesting time is to correlate ping times to suckage. I remember the Quake1 days where LPB's were very highly regarded -- and whenever one appeared on the server, all the modem users would hit their little chat keys and gripe about the LPB that just joined the game.
"I'm on a T1, guys," the LBP would say and would -- under most circumstances -- dominate the game. There were (at least from my vantage point as a modem gamer playing with mostly other modem players) very few LPBs, and those that I recall playing with -- especially in the Q1 days -- were pretty good and knew how to exploit their LPBness.
Now, however, it's a whole different story. You got SDSL users, wacky @home kiddies, whiny ADSL users, and the odd Starband user who invariably lands in your game, starts chatting about pings ("Hey, guys, I'm on Starband! Look at my terrible ping!") and then starts wanting to know you can see his new skin ("Hey, Kelso, can you see my new Skin?").
Ping times have gone down, but suckage -- at least from where I sit on my SDSL -- has gone way, way up. Which leads me to believe that the overall on-line gaming ain't what it used to be. When suckage is so high and pings are so low, you get discouraged.
Campers never bothered me, BFGers never bothered me, but there's nothing worse than a LPB that sucks.
playing with a ping greater than 80 just suxx (sorry for that).
:>) is a hp weapon if you use it to mine a whole area but aimed in air hits are not really makeable.
:)
railing with a ping of 80 is nearly impossible. sure you can hit someone if he stays on route but even im q3dm17 (longest yard) a good player wont be hit by a 80 player due some in air movement.
shafting has become easier in q3a than it was in qw since it has become more inexactly but with 150 there is no fun in wasteing 100 cells and hitting the oponent 2 times.
the plasma and even the rocketlauncher, due to the smaller splash damage area, are low to medium ping weapons.
the shotgun is a weapon which works with a high ping well. also one should not underestimate the power of this one but all the other weapons are low to med ping weapons.
the grenny (no not your grandma, the grenade launcher
now most of you will say woha, ping 80, thats what i dream about, and i think the poster also wants 150 fps. but i can only say: try it out. play with ping 150 and with 80 and 40. you will feel the difference. Even between 80 and 40.
you can even see a difference between 40 and something about the 20ies if you make much use of the shaft and the railgun.
with ping 150 you also can loose sounds and these are importent (not that much in a 4on4 than in a 1on1).
so whats left to say, 150 bad, 80 playable, <40 clanwar. playing a clanwar with a ping >40 pushes you to the loser site a bit.
that does not mean you can not win the game because tactics can be played at 80 and 150 and if your oponents have a ping of 20 but nothing than the pummel they wont be much of a thread