Lets talk about PING in DB.

(BMXer) #1

I don’t think there is another thread addressing the issues with high ping in Dirty Bomb so I am starting one. I feel like it needs some discussion…

I can pretty much only get a decent ping to US West servers so I typically only play on US West servers. Almost every match I play is overrun by players with ridiculous pings! I’ve trolled enough in game so now I am making a post about it.

I realize MM is still super broken and it still matches AUS and EU player to US server almost every time. Will MM be fixed soon?

I hear people say “DB handles high ping better than any game ive played”. And this may be true but that doesn’t mean its ok to play with 180+ ping!
The game does feel pretty smooth with high ping. My problem is the hit reg. It seem almost advantageous to have a stupid high ping in 1v1 situations.
On a server populated by high pingers I find myself dying around corners WAY WAY too much… I find I have to shoot more bullets to down a high ping enemy and I find it much easier for high pingers to escape.
These seem like problems the player WITH the high ping should have… not the player with 35-40 ping!

Is it just me and my connection or what? Its night and day when I play on US W servers overrun by high pingers compared to normal/legit pings.

Open up more EU server, fix MM, give some incentive for players to help populate servers in their region!

“All the EU servers are full”… Waiting a few minutes is worse than playing with 190+ ping?
“All the AUS servers are empty”… Help populate a server in your region?

endrantaboutidiothighpingers

(Glottis-3D) #2

i have the same feeling.
hihg pingers are very different from pow pingers. and i do not see them being in disadvantage. but i myself have to readjust something in my game to counter them.

(Violator) #3

Totally agree and have done since day one (though not as bad as previously, high ping snipers are impossible to avoid (for some reason a lot of non-EU players seem to prefer vassili) as they can easily corner kill you with the HB sensor - luckily there aren’t many high pingers in the EU servers I play on. Doing the reverse on a US server feels cheap when I’ve tried it). On US servers though I find that the delay between hitting fire and it shooting is quite bad now adding to my already aged reaction times. The ‘simulkill’ (when you kill a player and they kill you at the same time) seems to happen mainly against higher ping players.

There will never be an ideal solution though due to the nature of ping and relative latency issues :(.

Using a shotgun against a high pinger is also hard due to the amount of leading you need to do compared to someone with an equivalent ping, I just keep hitting where they were 0.5s ago

(Anti) #4

Yep, we’re looking to get the matchmaking to wrong regions fixed ASAP.

(Rémy Cabresin) #5

The problem atm is more that EU seems to be full servers all the time, you either have to Auto join EU and wait for like ~10 minutes(and you have to be lucky that the server you’re trying to join has people leaving) to get a slot or you have to go US servers and get continuous whine about your ping(and the ping sucks for them and for yourself). With enough servers this problem wouldn’t matter :stuck_out_tongue:

(INF3RN0) #6

I must be the only one who doesn’t notice a lot of difference between low and high ping :o. Only seems to become a visible issue if I hit 250+. Getting put in an EU server when MM with all NA though can be a tad troll mode heh.

(Anti) #7

This is being looked into as well.

(Ecano) #8

And finally when you get join the match map is finishing and you are losing because one has left before finish. :smiley:

(BMXer) #9

Please have a look at the antilag code… or whatever its called.
It seems like the antilag is tuned for pretty much any ping. Could it be optimized for more realistic pings? 150 or so being the upper limit and anything above that is detrimental.
Its great that the antilag code is so playable at higher pings but I feel like there should be some limits. It doesn’t seem fair to even consider catering to players with 150+ ping… much less giving them an advantage!
Optimize the antilag code for the real world with realistic pings. It doesn’t make sense to cater to players who shouldn’t even be on the server in the first place due to their location!

(Zenity) #10

As annoying as it can be, they don’t have an advantage. Anything that happens to you with that player happens to that player with everybody.

Also whenever you get a kill trade, the high pinger actually shot you first, but you still got the kill because your shot arrived sooner at the server.

Everyone occasionally has annoying lag spikes or something, so anytime you put an exception in, the situation will become a bit worse for everybody. E.g. you would start seeing more people complain about hit detection.

I think it works really well already, and people aren’t playing with a high ping for giggles or to exploit. Once the situation is so that we usually find games in our region, I expect that we will see very few high pingers and we’ll still benefit from the great lag compensation.

(Ceres) #11

Is it weird that I usually get killed just when I run behind a wall even with and against low pings :o

(INF3RN0) #12

Servers are probably in need of more optimization, however at no point is someone actually getting damage on you behind the wall so it’s not really granting any advantages. It’s annoying/confusing yes, but not a huge issue imo. I might not be as attentive, but I haven’t noticed it too much. Might be better depending on ISPs, but hopefully it improves.

(Szakalot) #13

it definitely happened a lot back when you were sniping on EU servers :stuck_out_tongue:

(Chux) #14

Agreed, ever since day one I felt higher pingers had an noticable advantage in some situations.

(Violator) #15

Consider this epic diagram:

pings.png1195×669 8.63 KB

This visualises two ways that the netcode could currently be working (I’m not sure which way it is using currently). The red square represents a high ping player (HPB) hitting another low ping player (the circle). The red circle is what the HPB sees and the the blue circle where the low pinger (LPB) appears from their POV relative to the HPB.

The left half is a ‘worst case’ scenario where no lag compensation is done (the distance between the circles being defined by the ping difference and the time it takes the victim to travel between the two points => corner kill!). The HPB sees the player as not yet being behind the wall and scores a hit. From the LPB’s point of view they made it behind the wall and die unfairly.

The right half implements some lag compensation, adding a green circle which represents the half-way point between the two POVs. This is of course going to be wrong for both players as they see it but it will reduce corner kills.

Another way would be on a hit to check whether a hit would be scored from both points of view (do a ray cast between shooter and victim and another between victim and shooter and only score a hit if both are not blocked). This may appear odd to both players and the shooter will now feel that their shots may be hitting but not registering. There will also be a performance hit due to there now being 2x the calculations required.

(Glottis-3D) #16

diagram <33

(Smooth) #17

[QUOTE=Violator;524850]Consider this epic diagram:

pings.png1195×669 8.63 KB

This visualises two ways that the netcode could currently be working (I’m not sure which way it is using currently). The red square represents a high ping player (HPB) hitting another low ping player (the circle). The red circle is what the HPB sees and the the blue circle where the low pinger (LPB) appears from their POV relative to the HPB.

The left half is a ‘worst case’ scenario where no lag compensation is done (the distance between the circles being defined by the ping difference and the time it takes the victim to travel between the two points => corner kill!). The HPB sees the player as not yet being behind the wall and scores a hit. From the LPB’s point of view they made it behind the wall and die unfairly.

The right half implements some lag compensation, adding a green circle which represents the half-way point between the two POVs. This is of course going to be wrong for both players as they see it but it will reduce corner kills.

Another way would be on a hit to check whether a hit would be scored from both points of view (do a ray cast between shooter and victim and another between victim and shooter and only score a hit if both are not blocked). This may appear odd to both players and the shooter will now feel that their shots may be hitting but not registering. There will also be a performance hit due to there now being 2x the calculations required.[/QUOTE]

Currently the death ghost system is using the ‘worst’ case scenario, where the time of death is defined by the attacker (obviously) but the positions visualised are shown from the victims point of view.

We’re hoping to update this down the line to show the death ghosts using the data from the attacker so players can better understand what actually happened.

When it comes to combat, we feel that it’s MUCH more important that players hit what they see, rather than have to lead targets based on ping. Getting shot after you’ve run around a corner is a little annoying on occasion, but it would be much more frustrating if all the bullet YOU fired were offset a little by ping or didn’t hit because ‘server said no’.

We want to have a WYSIWYG system no matter what the relative pings are for all players. There’s still some fine tuning to do but that’s our general philosophy here.

EDIT: When it comes to matchmaking, the algorithms and server set-up are all very new and we will be tweaking these over time to prioritise low-latency games. This will also be much easier when we open up DB to more people.

(Chux) #18

[QUOTE=Smooth;525036]
When it comes to combat, we feel that it’s MUCH more important that players hit what they see, rather than have to lead targets based on ping. Getting shot after you’ve run around a corner is a little annoying on occasion, but it would be much more frustrating if all the bullet YOU fired were offset a little by ping or didn’t hit because ‘server said no’.[/QUOTE]

This is more or less ok as long as everyone has a similar ping. But I once had an situation where I looked down the road, saw no one,turned around went behind a corner and ended up dead. I got shot from that very same road hat was supposed to be empty. I would generally disagree that it’s better for players to hit what they see simply because you can influence your side much more and such a system is more prone to abuse. Turn up the torrents to the max and have a advantage.

(Szakalot) #19

works both ways. The bigger the difference in pings between the players the more advantageous it is to be the one peeking. And since movement is so fast, camping angles doesnt really work the way it can in CS

(Voshy) #20

I don’t agree here. I think it is much more frustrating when you die when you think you shouldn’t than miss when you think you shouldn’t. Hitting what you see is great, but not better than having the ability to hide/run for HP when you think you are not winning the fight, or just decide to wait for teammates. At the moment, you hide in what seems the perfect moment just to end up dead after a second. I know there is no perfect answer for the problem, but i will always choose the ability to be aware of my current state of HP and the ability to make a tactical decision over not missing someone with huge ping difference. Also, it is not OK for people who choose servers with low ping to be punished because of few of them who won’t do the same. And as there is no solution that works ok for both sides, high ping SHOULD be at a disadvantage. System as it is would be ok if you cap it to ~120 ping max (maybe even 100), everything over that brings too much frustration to lower ping player and should be removed.

but you are not giving us WYSIWYG, you are giving us only “what you see is what you hit”. And that would maybe be the same thing in a game where 2 players just stand in an open map and shoot at each other. But with DB being the tactical objective based team game, it isn’t so. Because if i take cover in time and get killed after, i am not getting what I see. If I decide to fall back and wait for teammates and die after I am already way out of sight for the other team, I am not getting what I see. I just get a lot of frustration for dying because of something I couldn’t see. “What 400pinger sees is what you get” is closer to the current state :wink: