high pingers at et - are they really harder to hit?

ouroboro · Post by **ouroboro** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 7:29 am

so perhaps we should force everyone to use the lowest common denominator in all settings? maybe we should assume that everyone is on 56k and force connection settings to reflect that, and assume everyone is using the exact same ancient graphics card and cpu and force visuals appropriately?

uhuh, ya, i'm sure that would go over like a lead balloon...

if your pc/connection suck, you have 3 options (funny how everything in life can be boiled down to three options, ain't it?):

1) upgrade
2) adapt
3) quit

life isn't fair. those same three choices apply to a real war, why should an online simulation be any different? some armies are simply better equipped than others - it doesn't always get reduced to a purified test of skill. if it did, we would fight wars one on one with bare hands. if you want to compete, you will have to invest some of your "gross domestic product" (allowance/income) into your "military" (hardware/connection).

if you don't have better than dialup in your area, you can always move

and if that seems too drastic for a video game (and it is), then you have just reminded yourself that it isn't really that important anyway (and it's not).

just enjoy the game on whatever level you can compete at, given your situation, and have fun. don't obsess over whether or not the guy who just fragged you really deserved it, or if he simply had an advantage - assuming he isn't cheating, you really have no valid recourse. if he IS breaking the rules, however, that's another ballgame entirely, and he should be flayed alive and rolled in vinegar.

aurellie · Post by **aurellie** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 10:43 am

ouroboro wrote: ...

So true

But it is not us (high pingers) who complain...

suave>>seed · Post by **suave>>seed** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 11:15 am

I actually did a little antilag experiment with a friend (equally skilled player). We first played on a server where he pinged 100 and I pinged 50. We dueled many times, and he won about 80% of duels. Then we went to a server where we both pinged 40 and we dueled the exact same way, the same number of times. This time it was about 50/50 won/loss.

Of course my "experiment" isn't anything definitive, but it told me all I personally needed to know. As much as people deny it, antilag does give *some* advantage to higher pingers. I've been talking with many top NA players lately and we all notice it - the phenomena that you just can't kill higher pingers as easily as people you ping the same as, regardless of the skill of the higher pinger.

Another quick example or two: sometimes I go on Euro servers, such as the esteemed Efterlyst, and I just RAGE with 150-200 ping. I can get kills easily, and I know that people are having trouble shooting me. Another time, on LockedBox, my ping spiked up to 300 for 10 minutes or so. I did just about as good or better than I was doing with 50 ping, and I was getting complaints that I was "impossible to hit", yet I had no trouble killing people.

And it kills me to see comments like "if you get killed by a high pinger, you suck." Simply not true, as some of the best ET players in the world (or at least in NA) are noticing the problem. Now, maybe it's not such a huge issue that it demands fixing, because it doesn't affect that many people. In fact, it only affects lower pingers (like below 60), giving them problems trying to kill higher pingers (70+). And of course, I don't foresee much sympathy from anyone because low pingers might for once be at a disadvantage.

What it comes down to is a minor issue that's just plain annoying. I just want to emphasize that the people who point it out are not hallucinating - that it really is an issue. If there is some way that I can *prove* that it's an issue, I will try and do so if somebody would look into it and see if a fix is possible. But from the replies in this thread by mods/admins so far, I don't think that's too realistic.

Grizbo · Post by **Grizbo** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 11:36 am

suave>>seed wrote: What it comes down to is a minor issue that's just plain annoying. I just want to emphasize that the people who point it out are not hallucinating - that it really is an issue.

Good post, I was going to reply to this thread in detail as well after some of the comments, but you just said it all very well really. There IS a difference, and even if you disabled the scoreboard (so no-one could check ping) a half decent player can tell, and I'm not refering to the obvious warping in some cases. They do sometimes just eat shots which disappear and other iffy things. They aren't unbeatable, I'm not saying that, but there's something you just know isn't going quite right there.

Maybe its not just high ping, but some associated effect that goes with it (packet loss being one the springs to mind), I don't know the ins and outs of the net code or anything. But I'm telling you, if you know the game you know when something is iffy.

I do half agree with Ouroboro as well in that if you've invested in a decent spec PC and a decent internet connection it IS a little galling to then have problems with playing the game and everyone had sympathy for the guy with the early 90's scrapheap and the "2 plastic cups and some string" approach to internet connections. I mean I'm not against trying to make the game more accessible to people and everything, just not at too high a cost to the rest of us.

Willstar · Post by **Willstar** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 1:53 pm

aurellie wrote: Why don't you try it yourself? Buy an cheap modem and play some clanwars.
I am sure high ping vs low ping question will not be problem for youanymore.

i ringed for some NA clans (im EU) and i was getting more headshots than ever. ofc ping jumping sucks but a stable ping of 150 is an advantage. i remember a 1on1 on vallhalla us server vs syn|inferno (afaik one of the best players in NA) and i got more hs than he got (and im not a player who gets hs and he is.) I just feel an advantage when i play in NA and i feel an disadvantage when playing in EU vs 90> pingers.

ReyalP · Post by **ReyalP** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 2:46 pm

suave>>seed wrote:I actually did a little antilag experiment with a friend (equally skilled player). We first played on a server where he pinged 100 and I pinged 50. We dueled many times, and he won about 80% of duels. Then we went to a server where we both pinged 40 and we dueled the exact same way, the same number of times. This time it was about 50/50 won/loss.

Did you record demos ? Would you be willing to repeat the experiment with demos or maybe ETTV demos (which record a lot more information) ?

I can't speak for the etpro team, but that sort of thing gives a lot more chance of fixing a problem then general whining... Especially in a community that is so fond of whining

It is always possible that there are real bugs. The key is to hunt them down in a rational manner.

Spark2 · Post by **Spark2** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 3:59 pm

This is so funny... Exactly the same comments have always been made in the Urban Terror community, with different antilag code (at first) and totally different hit detection. I'm sure both games had some crazy bug which made you hit the head more often if you had a high ping. Right...

So we have this "issue" since many years and so far nobody was able to prove it. If it's so obvious, you'd think that everyone could show some demos, where the problem is visible all over the place, right?

Stop whining about it and try some serious investigation. Check your demos. Read the sourcecode if you can. Try to come up with explainations that actually make sense. But stop talking about how you owned with 150ms or about your "sientific" tests while dueling a teammate. That's simply not helpful, because it doesn't make any sense and it could still be imagination. The fact that many people claim this doesn't prove anything, as it could be caused by the same kind of placebo effect which made a lot of people believe that ETPro changed the hitboxes in earlier releases. And of course it's a very tempting thought for lowpingers (like me) that they are at a disadvantage... Too many use it as an excuse already and it could subconsciously affect your playing, to be more in line with your theory. There have never been any hard facts and me writing this certainly won't change it, which already makes me doubt why I'm writing it at all.

But now that I already wasted so much time with it, I feel bad about just erasing it.

Oh and it would be so easy for germans to play with a ping of 100... Just disable fastpath. You'd even save some money. Why is nobody doing it? Why are so many people whining if they can't get fastpath in their area? Why didn't I suddenly become worse when I got fastpath? So many questions...

Grizbo · Post by **Grizbo** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 4:02 pm

demo playback probably won't help a great deal, since the playback is from a 0 ping perspective? I always thought that made them pretty useless in showing ping related issues, but if I'm wrong do correct me

ouroboro · Post by **ouroboro** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 4:14 pm

i have to say that i kinda-sorta know what seed is talking about. i switched from cable to DSL recently, and my pings dropped substantially (from about 80-120 on my favorite servers to about 50-90). obviously i wanted that to happen, but what i did notice was that i seemed to be getting raged more and not raging as much myself, lol.

i havn't paid it any mind though, and am just enjoying the better connection. look, unless and until everybody has an identical rig, there will be these problems. all developers can do is try and make them less and less noticeable.

if anyone is REALLY bothered by it, you can always quit playing on the WAN and only play at LAN parties - but that would mean all your opponents seeing all your tricks and tweaks, so that opens another whole can of worms, eh?

ReyalP · Post by **ReyalP** » Sat Dec 18, 2004 6:31 pm

Grizbo wrote:demo playback probably won't help a great deal, since the playback is from a 0 ping perspective? I always thought that made them pretty useless in showing ping related issues, but if I'm wrong do correct me

As I understand it an ETTV demo would show you what really happened on the server. A client demo is harder to interpret. In either case, the next task would be figuring out *why* the high pinger is doing better (if they in fact are) and how that relates to the game code. That may be anywhere from hard to impossible, but it is better than going by random peoples 'feel'.

(me personal feeling is that at low pings there are times when it feels very 'disconnected'... I shoot what should be the right place, and only a few percent of the bullets land, where as with a steady high ping, it is a bit easier. But this is just feeling and rather unreliable.)

Just because it *could* be imagination or placebo doesn't mean that it is. The problem is how to prove it one way or the other.

I disagree that it would be 'easy' to spot if there were an actual problem. RTCW antilag is a good example. When it came out, a lot of good players complained that it 'ruined' headshots. Yet no one really paid attention, and Rhea (coder for RTCW OSP) claimed it was fine. A couple years later, I finally actually paid attention to the code and realized that in RTCW, heads didn't get antilagged at all (along with various other problems). Yet from a players perspective (i.e. without reading through that particular code line by line, or putting diagnostics in the code) it would be very hard to prove it.

Spoofeh · Post by **Spoofeh** » Sun Dec 19, 2004 4:50 am

So, does anyone want to buy my 28.8k modem?

EagleReloaded · Post by **EagleReloaded** » Sun Dec 19, 2004 10:09 pm

You're advertising it all wrong. You need to advertise an analogue to digital modulation converter capable of synchronously sending and receiving over 56000 pieces of data a second.

DG · Post by DG » Mon Dec 20, 2004 3:24 pm

players know lag causes weirdness, so weirdness ingame gets blamed on lag. High pingers natually assume weirdness is due to their lag and hence the 'disadvantage' is nobody elses fault, while low pinger (nb: low scoreboard ping doesnt mean good connection) would assume they are being disadvantaged and it must be the fault of the HPB.

Same as timenudge, there was so much whine about it because players with shit connections naturally tended to use timenudge, so players notice a correlation between players that warp also having timenudge. When it suits them or their paranoia/scepticism, people like to forget that correlation does not equal cause and effect, and anyway will forget about non-warping players who have tn, since brains like to look for what they want to find.

SoL · Post by **SoL** » Mon Dec 20, 2004 7:25 pm

I play ET on an ADSL connection, but fastpath is not enabled, so my connection is interleaved at 30ms. This results in a ping of 98ms (ingame) to most ET servers in Europe. I ping about 65ms to them in dos. I guess you could say i'm a "high-pinger" in that case. Although i don't think i'm particularly hard to hit and nobody has ever told me that i was hard to hit either. I'm fairly confident in ETPros antilag and antiwarp. I myself have never had too much problems hitting players of equal ping. My ping is stable, it doesn't flux very much either. I recently specced the 141 vs insanity game on ETTV and i noticed the insanity player's pings were fluxing alot between 100-200. Perhaps that is why so many people complain that they are hard to hit? Hitting a high-pinger that has stable ping normally is not a problem, but someone whose ping is constantly changing must play havoc with antilag. On a similar note, "net settings laming" in ET has been reduced significantly, ie. lower snaps/packets doesn't change the feel of hitting someone at all, and most leagues force timenudge on 0, but i am 110% positive i can tell when someone is using a low rate (<10,000). It's definatley harder to hit people who use a low rate, it's particularly noticable while sniping. It seems like you line up and hit 5 shots on them and only 1 or 2 connect, and please don't respond "learn to aim" or something, since i don't have that problem with people using rate >10,000. So basically i have faith in antilag, but i wouldn't be surprised if something funky is going on when someones ping is fluxing alot. I don't know what can be done about the rate thing, unless leagues increase the lowest allowed value of it.

Post by **bani** » Mon Dec 20, 2004 7:47 pm

SoL wrote:Hitting a high-pinger that has stable ping normally is not a problem, but someone whose ping is constantly changing must play havoc with antilag.

antilag affects the shooter, not the person being hit. so no, constantly changing ping of your target doesn't affect your antilag at all. antilag is you, not them.