Lag

[Aurora219]

Lag. Latency. Delay. Ping.

In this day and age, where broadband is readily available to the masses, gaming servers are more able to handle the stress of hundreds of thousands of gamers, systems are tweaked for heady frame rates and multi-layered texturing - it all takes a bit of drive.

That said, it's taken as granted these days that everything runs smoothly. Normally, this would run on system specs of your PC or console, but then you also have to factor in local bandwidth and server capacity for online gaming. This all runs in the background.

So why is lag a number one complaint, up there with griefers and bugs?

We are all human, and lag is an incredibly frustrating experience for everyone involved. Sneaking up on someone for the knife kill just to see them walking into a wall and then kill you without you ever even seeing them move is somewhat unfair..

I for one curse American servers. The most prolific example of this for me is Halo 3 due to game style. In my experience most American players enjoy a split second advantage in most of their actions online; this invariably means the difference between life or death when death is a melee punch away. My connection isn't top notch, but at the same time it's not a 56k. 2.2Mb connections should be plenty good enough for any one game at any one time, in my opinion.

So what part of this complaint do I have wrong? If I was entirely correct the issue would have been addressed a long time ago, faith ensuing. And what can we do, technologically and programming-wise to combat this game killing affliction that is latency?

For me, lag has killed far too many good gaming experiences for me. I have, in the past, abandoned brilliantly conceived games due to not being able to see my opponent. UT, Halo.. I'm sure you can add plenty more.

 

[joswie]

It really depends on the kind of game. If you play any fighting game online, lag will eat you alive because just every one needs split second timing, but other genres/games do not require such lightning quickness, so lag will be a non-issue for those who play those games.

 

[NeedAUserName]

Ooooh burned

 

[Heroic One]

Lag in some games is just annoying. Lag in others is ridiculously frusterating "That is total bullshit!" moments in others.

Avoid the latter, enjoy the former.

 

[vamp rocks]

because some people try to hide behind lag when they get killed or someone does something seemingly impossible. also because people around the world try to play with eachother and the signal must go farther

 

[anNIALLator]

I was playing Halo 3 once when the game lagged out and the guy I was shooting started running against a wall. While waiting I absent mindedly bashed him as he stood there, but he disappeared and the game told me that he'd killed me. The next day in school he boasted about it. It was really annoying.

 

[BallPtPenTheif]

Does anybody know why Warhawk barely lags? I agree with the OP but I rarely see Warhawk lag out at all and I wonder if it's a client side illusion or if the developers are wizard scientists.

On the OP point, a lot of this is left over from consumer expectations carried over from the PC end. PC users are used to shit not fully working as intended and bearing the burden of optimization. Many FPS developers these days are old PC developers so it is no surprise that they would carry over their same user experience into Console.

 

[Aurora219]

There's another interesting enigma, one I'm seriously guilty of.

Blaming lag for every death, every missed shot. I simultaneously find a kid screaming at me because he can't hit me hilarious and my inability to see or hit someone myself frustrating as hell.

But still, it's definitely a problem, and as has been pointed out, it's harder to identify lag as one may originally consider.

Latency in RTSes and similar = slow gaming. Not a problem, just ..slower!
Latency in fighting games, shooting games, MMO PvP and other reaction-based games really suffer.

 

[MindBullets]

Once we fit specialised cables and use them for the internet instead of telephone lines, we should have it solved. Don't expect it to happen overnight, though.

 

[BallPtPenTheif]

Once we fit specialised cables and use them for the internet instead of telephone lines, we should have it solved. Don't expect it to happen overnight, though.

Console centric developers seem to have a better grasp on the issue. They have higher expectations for the end user experience compared to PC centric developers.

 

[Wermut]

Remember that the length of wire and the type of wire used is a factor (a small factor to make a point).
Basically thousands of variables are in work in online gaming. At this point it seems unavoidable to experience lag once and a while.

 

[Xvito]

I only lose because of lag.
And haxx...
Fucking haxx man.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

Lag happens. Get over it

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

My connection isn't top notch, but at the same time it's not a 56k. 2.2Mb connections should be plenty good enough for any one game at any one time, in my opinion.

Bandwidth, in most cases, has next to nothing to do with latency. I will use an analogy I read elsewhere that best describes the situation.

Imagine that you have a half-mile-long fire hose. Downloading a large file over a broadband connection is like turning on the water full-blast. It might take the water a second or so to get to your end, but once it gets there you've got a full stream to handle.

Now, think of Internet gaming as if you and a friend were at opposite ends of this hose, and trading messages by writing them on ping-pong balls and rolling them back and forth through the hose. Obviously, there is going to be a lot more time involved in this form of communication than if the fire hose were only two feet long. And in this case, it doesn't matter if the fire hose is a foot wide or barely bigger than a ping-pong ball- the total time of transmission stays exactly the same.

In a basic way, the Internet really is a series of tubes- it is nothing more than a large number of computers all communicating through wires. The more computers and wires inbetween you and the computer you want to talk to, the longer it will take for a message (packet) to get there and back again. You're complaining that you (a gamer in England) have higher latency while playing on an American server than American players do; are you surprised? Your data has to cross three thousand miles (that's a little over 4800 km for you metric folks) of wire just to get to our shores- and that's assuming that the server you want to play on is on the East Coast. Heaven forbid you want to play on a server located in, say, California, because that's ANOTHER 3000 miles of wires and computers (each and every one of differing quality) you'd have to go through. It's like complaining that it would take longer for your postcard to get to my family in New Jersey than it would for mine to get there.

I see by your profile's birthdate that you're twenty years old. You may not have been into online gaming back in the days before multiplayer games could manage things such as client prediction. Trust me, it was a LOT worse back then. The games we play, and the Internet itself, have made strides to cut down on and compensate for latency, but until the laws of physics- or the very nature of the Internet- change... well, let's just say my family in New Jersey is going to hear from me a lot faster than you.

 

[neems]

I believe a lot of console games have client hosted multiplayer as well? You are always going to find lag in that sort of situation (free kills for the host). The one time I tried online play with the pc version of Gears Of War I was astonished to discover that it was client hosting (I assumed the pc version could / would have dedicated servers). I didn't try it again.

Other than that, Rogue Wolf is correct. Most online games don't actually use much bandwidth - a lot of games, particularly Valve ones, allow you to see your bandwidth usage. Once when I was having internet issues I discovered I could play Counter Strike Source with a ping of 50 odd with only 15k downstream. I couldn't use ventrilo at the same time though.

 

[Syndicate Savage]

Its just a nuisance in games you have to learn to cope with. Such as Halo 1 lag, the games fun, it just takes a while to get used to the insane bullet lag.

 

[Death Magnetic]

Lag's saved my sorry ass a couple of times so I'm fine with it as long as it's not constant.

 

[Divinegon]

The only reason I hate Nintendo right after loving it is because they don't overall seem to care much about their Wi-fi capacities over the world, like if someone from Europe contacted someone from America. Either it lags horribly or it doesn't even connect.

And sadly, same thing happens with any game overall, and it doesn't have to have many people. I thought after some years, we reached the point where lag would be almost non existent no matter distance unless the server was horrible filled up.

 

[Cowtippers]

Sadly lag is the major killing point for me when I play games like Faces of War online, because if you so much as drive a tank smack into a building so the whole thing crashes down it seems that your internet connection has to do so much work that Nazi concentration camp inhabitants would be relieved to see someone else being the workhorse for once..

Long story short, 4mb connection = shit when tumbling down a few walls in a game.

 

[x434343]

What kinda lag? Is it server lag, graphics lag, sound lag, performance lag?