Forums » Suggestions
People's connection latency to the VO server has a noticeable effect on PvP (particularly high-skilled energy battles). I'm not talking about extreme laggers who zipzag around at the speed of light. I'm talking about people with normal, stable broadband internet connections that are just very very far away from the server.
Affected factors include:
-A latent target causing one's autoaim to go haywire (i.e. the redrawing of the autoaim reticle appears to overcompensate with increased relative movement on latent targets -- compared to people who are closer to the server, and thus are presumably less latent)
-A latent target's shots eminating further away from their ship than yours than ones with less latency
-The ability to weave and dodge magically
Assuming these are not things that can be fixed, I'd like to propose the following as compensation.
Suggestion:
Add an option to place a small numerical indicator showing the average (to the minute, or to every 10 seconds or something that will not cause one's own game to lag more) ping latency to the VO server of the target in the HUD somewhere (like in the target reticle).
Or, if the "ping" is not the most relevant indicator -- whatever other statistic that would be more relevant could replace it. Bottom line -- it would be nice to have the option of having an idea of someone's latency when you are engaging them. As things are now, we expect everyone to not have latency and then get frustrated when people exhibit it subtly as I've indicated above.
Affected factors include:
-A latent target causing one's autoaim to go haywire (i.e. the redrawing of the autoaim reticle appears to overcompensate with increased relative movement on latent targets -- compared to people who are closer to the server, and thus are presumably less latent)
-A latent target's shots eminating further away from their ship than yours than ones with less latency
-The ability to weave and dodge magically
Assuming these are not things that can be fixed, I'd like to propose the following as compensation.
Suggestion:
Add an option to place a small numerical indicator showing the average (to the minute, or to every 10 seconds or something that will not cause one's own game to lag more) ping latency to the VO server of the target in the HUD somewhere (like in the target reticle).
Or, if the "ping" is not the most relevant indicator -- whatever other statistic that would be more relevant could replace it. Bottom line -- it would be nice to have the option of having an idea of someone's latency when you are engaging them. As things are now, we expect everyone to not have latency and then get frustrated when people exhibit it subtly as I've indicated above.
+1 to an indicator of a targeted opponents latency
+1 if this is done as a value that can be called by a plugin. I don't see much point to actually adding it to the game itself.
I'm opposed to adding new features only accessible by plugins. If people don't like it they can turn it off.
+1
Would be interesting to compare people's connection. I assume that "induced lag" or most of the other assumingly-possible cheats could be spotted with such a tool and people could just check the stats of the people who they think are not playing fair.
Would be interesting to compare people's connection. I assume that "induced lag" or most of the other assumingly-possible cheats could be spotted with such a tool and people could just check the stats of the people who they think are not playing fair.
The reason I make that condition is because the players that would benefit from this would be the combat oriented vets. New and non or seldom pvp players wouldn't get much if any value from the information.
I suspect that creating a variable to hold the data would be fairly simple. Adding it to the game could be much more complicated. Let the player base add the information how and where they prefer rather than commit scarce dev time to it.
tbh, I really don't see this condition as any different than the many things we take for granted with existing plugins- such as notification of players entering or leaving a sector.
I suspect that creating a variable to hold the data would be fairly simple. Adding it to the game could be much more complicated. Let the player base add the information how and where they prefer rather than commit scarce dev time to it.
tbh, I really don't see this condition as any different than the many things we take for granted with existing plugins- such as notification of players entering or leaving a sector.
+1
@"Death Fluffy" for the player base to do this in a plugin, the server would give all clients the ip address of the targeted player to the local client plugin. Personally, I don't like that idea.
No KB, that is not what Fluffy meant. He meant that instead of the devs doing the GUI side of the work, he just wants them to add a GetTargetPing() function, which would query the server for whatever the cached ping for the target player is. Zero need to involve people's IP addresses.
@Pizzasgood ok, that's fine, too
+1
Other games have a feature like this.
Other games have a feature like this.
+1
but first, fix /set nShowNetQualReport 1
It spams way too much. It gets fixated on an unrealistically low ping, and does not ever reset it's reported "average". I have yet to make a bind that can toggle it on and/or off.
seeing your own connection is more important than seeing your targets connection.
but first, fix /set nShowNetQualReport 1
It spams way too much. It gets fixated on an unrealistically low ping, and does not ever reset it's reported "average". I have yet to make a bind that can toggle it on and/or off.
seeing your own connection is more important than seeing your targets connection.
Bump. Give us the opportunity to choose whether it's worth engaging targets based on latency.
-1
-1
My ping is sometimes 180 for an entire day but I don't lag since it stays 180. that wouldn't stop you from pointing at it and saying that you died due to my lag, Wally.
My ping is sometimes 180 for an entire day but I don't lag since it stays 180. that wouldn't stop you from pointing at it and saying that you died due to my lag, Wally.
+0
While the idea has merit, as Eyvndir says, I can see it simply becoming the default excuse for losing.
While the idea has merit, as Eyvndir says, I can see it simply becoming the default excuse for losing.
+1 roda
Someone who makes excuses for loosing will always find a path to do so regardless of the toys we have.
Someone who makes excuses for loosing will always find a path to do so regardless of the toys we have.
So, absolute ping is usually not the problem, if I recollect. I mean, it contributes, but the more common issue is jitter, or unpredictable variations in latency.
If we were to engineer a feature to make gameplay changes based on perceptible "lag", it would be by measuring this "jitter", keeping a rolling average of a given player's latency, and degrading their status based on big latency variations. So it might just be a simple three-stage "Network Stability" stat, that just said "great, average, poor", which could also be color-coded and then that color could be added to a little dot next to the character name in the Selected Target panel or some such.
I'm not sure that there's a lot of value in showing the absolute ping time. We could do that, but something like what I describe might be more useful.
If we were to engineer a feature to make gameplay changes based on perceptible "lag", it would be by measuring this "jitter", keeping a rolling average of a given player's latency, and degrading their status based on big latency variations. So it might just be a simple three-stage "Network Stability" stat, that just said "great, average, poor", which could also be color-coded and then that color could be added to a little dot next to the character name in the Selected Target panel or some such.
I'm not sure that there's a lot of value in showing the absolute ping time. We could do that, but something like what I describe might be more useful.
A three color indicator sounds good. Any idea of how often the average of latency variations would be calculated? In other words is this an hourly thing, or is it something that we could see change alongside a noticeable change in percieved lag during a fight?
It would have to be pretty often to be useful, I think. Latency variations tend to be sporadic and uncommon, except for people on super bad connections. So it would need to be often enough to catch them in a useful way. We'd probably have to experiment with heuristics and how to weight things.
It should be visible as lag teleportation appeared, or at least within a couple seconds of that.
Of course, this might also illuminate some other cases, like where Player A appears to be lagging to Player B, but only because Player B's ability to receive data is jittery. In that case, the server would definitely not flag Player A or B as having an unstable connection, because as far as the server is concerned, it would not be the case (Player A's connection is stable, and the server can't tell that Player B's outbound packets aren't being received without some sort of loopback data from the client).
Fully closed-loop analysis is possible too, but gets more complicated. Although even the "simple" version of this would require some thought to put together.
It should be visible as lag teleportation appeared, or at least within a couple seconds of that.
Of course, this might also illuminate some other cases, like where Player A appears to be lagging to Player B, but only because Player B's ability to receive data is jittery. In that case, the server would definitely not flag Player A or B as having an unstable connection, because as far as the server is concerned, it would not be the case (Player A's connection is stable, and the server can't tell that Player B's outbound packets aren't being received without some sort of loopback data from the client).
Fully closed-loop analysis is possible too, but gets more complicated. Although even the "simple" version of this would require some thought to put together.