Latency or LAG is an issue that faces some gamers.

It is usually down to PC spec and or connection speed. But we no see some players using software to limit their connection speed and lag as a result.

What ever next????

This “disruptor” gamer seems to be most worried about (using my terminology) first mover advantage caused by temporal buffering.

However, I think his analysis rig is much more interesting than the conclusions he draws. Synchronised video clips side-by-side is great; I wonder what his synchronisation method was. Although in my experiments I did have a network bridge which could shape the traffic to make unusual lag effects, I didn’t have any decent recording set-up.

This post also shows that Valve really have opened up a lot of their engine to internal tweaking/ jiggery-pokery — credit to them! Only pity is that the tactical engagements in counterstrike are a bit more limited than in other games to analyse (no vehicles, fewer postures, fewer slow-moving projectile weapons etc.), though I agree it still is probably best classed as “tactical”.

Maybe I should post a link to this paper in certain gamers forums. But I don’t want LBT to be overwhelmed

Cheers, Mike.

Often in Half-life based games, two players will shoot at almost exactly the same time, and both must wait about 200-300ms before they know who was hit.

This has also lead to a number of exploits, such as speed hacks (informing the server that you actually moved that way about 1.5 seconds ago).

This is especially important in games where bullets are NOT beams, such as Team Fortress. Instead, bullets and rockets are visibly moving projectiles which can be strafed around - indicating that they have a time component.

Knowing the guy well I know he does not do this deliberately, he really has no choice in the matter. However it would not surprise me that other people will sacrifice the experience of the richness of the game in order to rack up more kills. I’m sure we’ve all seen screenshots of DirectX exploits that do just this.

Re: smoke About the smoke being used as a tactic against those with inferior PCs… I am aware of the “no smoking please” rule in many servers, but I’d never considered that someone might smoke deliberately because he had a fast PC and thought he could gain an edge. Certain games can have smoke effects disabled at graphics driver level, or even in game settings, and so this also reduces people’s confidence in the effectiveness of smoke.

Re: latencies. I agree with you that my example with an average ping of 200ms is pessimistic for serious clan play, but it may not be that crazy for public servers, and this is where the casual players get the most harsh treatment from the pros. If the pros keep themselves to themselves, then that’s just fine.

While it is undeniable that most serious players strive for low pings, remember that it may still be a myth that lower ping is better. So I agree that high pingers may not be prevalent, but when they do come along, and then beat the low pingers, it all starts to seem unfair. I also believe that Valve’s lag compensation algorithm starts to behave very counterintuitively indeed in the case of asymmetric ping.

There is a little empirical evidience that high pingers can in certain circumstances perform better. I note the work by Dick et. al in my paper (reference #1), who did do a proper scientific survey of about three or four shooters. They say in their NETGAMES 2005 paper :

“For the objective game results, Figure 7 shows the relation
between average GOS and latency. For Counter Strike the
results are indetermined as there is no clear relation between
the score and the latency. Surprisingly, the highest game
score on average is achieved under the worst network condi-
tions.”

Whether it’s 200ms or 20ms, I still believe the effects manifest themselves — it’s just about the degree of human conscious observability. Furthermore, even with no network transport latency at all, my paper still can tot up about 250ms latency from temporal buffering and frame processing.

I really need to get round to making a proper recording rig that can produce 1ms accurate synchronised video footage from several different players machines of the same combat encounter. Then we can really see some of these effects unfold in “slow motion”.

Another tactic that comes to mind, along the same lines, could be classed perhaps as an FPS Bomb and is essentially a DoS attack. Increasing the strain on an opponents graphics card so as noticeable lag is introduced. This could be done by increasing the number of elements in a players FOV to such a level the players machine is unable to process them correctly.

E.g. In CS:S, smoke grenades are quite taxing on a graphics card, utilising a number of them can cause a players screen to become quite ‘jerky’ and may decrease player response time and accuracy. The players with more powerful CPU/GPU combinations will suffer no slowdown.

This is obviously a somewhat less subtle tactic than manipulating minor nuances in network code and is quite well known, so perhaps not so relevant.

In general though, with broadband so common and latencies involved being extremely low, I can’t see such tactices being particularly prevalent. A typical server will involve a range of pings from maybe around 20 up to 70 (anecdotal values from CS:S servers. Players simply don’t play on servers where their ping is much higher). A gap of 50ms is very small, and on average the gap will be in the order or 20-30. Taking an average of 200ms seems to me to be somewhat overly pessimistic.

However, I shall be keeping an eye out for such tactics in the future. I never realised I was doing so much research previously. My supervisor will be delighted.