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Gamers in Hawaii Can't Compete... Because of Latency (theoutline.com)

Sometimes it's very important to know that the servers of the web services you're using are situated somewhere in your neighbourhood. And it's not just because of privacy concerns. The Outline has a story this week in which it talks about gamers in Hawaii who're increasingly finding it difficult to compete in global tournaments because the games' servers are almost every time placed overseas. From the article: [...] The game's server is in Chicago. That means if you live in the Midwest, your computer can communicate with it almost instantaneously. If you're in L.A., it can take roughly 60 milliseconds. But if you're in Hawaii, it can take 120 milliseconds, with some players reporting as long as 200 milliseconds. And at the highest echelons of competitive video gaming, milliseconds matter. [...] In League and other eSports games, playing on a high ping is a big disadvantage. The goal of the game is to set up defenses to protect your base while pushing forward to capture the enemy's base, and there are typically lightning bolts and fireballs and slime-spitting dragons shooting across the screen. Playing on a high ping means players may not see all of the action that happens in a game. Latency can really screw things up for a young eSports scene, said Zack Johnson, who runs gg Circuit, a global tournament provider for gaming centers like PC Gamerz. Players on the mainland sometimes say they don't want to compete against Hawaii players, he said, because the high ping throws things off.

7 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Depends on the game by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Any decent game will have lag compensation, so the server allows the player's reaction to (approximately) what they saw on their screen at the time they saw it to apply.

    For example, let's say two players shoot a killing shot at each other at exactly the same time. With a typical game the 200 ping player's action would be delayed enough for a low-ping player to kill before the server receives the "shoot" action from the high ping player. The high ping player fires at the other guy who takes no damage and the game eventually receives the "you died" message (in reality, the high ping player never fired since he died first). With lag compensation, the server can see the player with high ping fired when he was still alive, according to his lag, and can do damage to the low-ping player, resulting in both players killing eac other. In some cases such systems can favor high-ping players, as low-ping players will see side effects such as bullets seeming to bend around corners to hit them (as the high-ping player hit them before they rounded the corner, from their point of view), while low-ping players will see less benefits from lag compensation themselves. But overall things are more fair than without lag compensation I think ,and really weird lag compensation side effects are thankfully rare.

    1. Re:Depends on the game by EvilSS · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Problem is unless they are implemented perfectly, lag compensation systems can be abused (see "lag switching", for example). For a competitive game that could turn into a real issue.

      --
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    2. Re:Depends on the game by rhazz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Any decent game will have lag compensation

      Yes, many games compensate for this by kicking players with bad latency because...

      low-ping players will see side effects such as bullets seeming to bend around corners to hit them

      ...that kind of shenanigans ruins the gameplay. This is also why in most twitch shooters, all other things equal, fortune favours the aggressor.

  2. Re:So move to Chicago. by ganjadude · · Score: 2, Interesting

    what id like to know is why they dont institute a lag into the system intentionally, so that everyone has the same lag as the least connected device in competition?

    --
    have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
  3. Re:On the plus side... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    death by homicide

    The reality is that Chicago is, by and large, a safe city for most of its residents. The worst violence is highly concentrated in rather small areas. You can see this for yourself by looking at a map of where the incidents occur.

    What the media often avoids covering, however, is the demographic side of this issue. Nearly all of this violence happens in neighborhoods with large black, and to a lesser extent Hispanic/Latino, populations.

    Most of the killings are blacks killing other blacks, often with gangs being involved in some way. It's not the police killing these people. It's not non-blacks killing these people. It's black-on-black violence.

    Some people will try to blame this on "poverty", but I don't think that's the case. We don't see anywhere near as much violence in the areas of the city that are poor, but predominantly non-black, for example. Some of these areas with poor non-black residents are actually worse off, from a financial and support standpoint, as they don't have access to the many social programs and the social assistance offered in many of the predominantly-black neighborhoods.

    This probably all comes down to culture. Too many black Americans have chosen to adopt a culture that glorifies gangs, violence, shootings, killing, drug abuse, and other crimes. Of course having this mindset will result in a violent and awful situation in which to live!

    Thankfully, there are some blacks to see through this nonsense. They realize that they can do better, and so they avoid the so-called "gangsta culture" that's so prevalent within their communities. But these people are marginalized and silenced by the various leftist groups, such as Black Lives Matter types of groups, that try to distract from the real problems affecting these communities.

    It isn't the police and it isn't non-blacks who are responsible for this black-on-black violence. The black community itself needs to work to put an end to this violence. It can't be something imposed on them from the outside. They'll need to work on this themselves. They need to get away from the violent culture they've adopted over the past 40 years. They need to get away from the leftism that places the blame everywhere but where the actual problem is.

  4. Re:So move to Chicago. by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I would suggest to you, that if a game gives an advantage to players with better ping times, it sucks. I understand that yes, ping times do matter, and responsiveness does matter. Don't play if you don't like the conditions.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  5. Re:You don't get out much by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Democrat run cities seem to be the worst, you can check the stats on that one.

    Let's see...San Francisco, median household income: $78,378. Los Angeles, $55,909. Chicago? $63,153. Detroit? $26,095. New York City (Home of the President, Donald Trump), $50,711. Looks like your examples are mostly doing well. The only one that's significantly below average is what, Detroit?

    So you've got one. Except Detroit is in Michigan. A state run by Republicans for years. Why haven't they fixed any of that city's problems? Why haven't they done what they did for Flint...oh wait, that wasn't a good thing.

    Besides, you want to know what's done about the Homeless? Bus tickets. Out of sight, out of mind.

    Of course, this has been a problem for decades problem for decades, but you're too busy blaming Democrats, as usual for yourself, but then...why can you offer no solutions, no miracles in your partisan bastions of prosperity?

    Oh wait, you think because you can rail about a few high-profile cities, you think nobody has driven through rural Mississippi and seen the abject poverty there.

    And you know what? A lot of those homeless are veterans. Maybe you're just not patriotic enough?