Hayashi, on 16 November 2012 - 09:43 AM, said:
To the developers:
If you've budgetary problems acquiring regional servers, a temp fix will be to have two servers - one 'North American' and one 'Global'. In the 'North American' server, the North American players with <100 ping will play with next to no 'netcode' issue. Players with ping any greater than 100 will be shunted to the 'Global' server when play is initiated - this server is ALSO located in Vancouver in your office - it can even be a server you already possess, if you have more than one server running at the moment, but players with >100 ping will all lag together here. This will let us at least play (which region locking the servers would not - DON'T do that unless you want a couple thousand MechWarrior fans and Founders on your tail), and will also solve the concerns of the North American gamer subpopulation, until you get enough funding to acquire regional servers to drop lag for everyone else. Every time you put a regional server, players with <100 ping will be autoassigned to it, and the 'global' server will take care of the large remainder. Lastly, if players decide to drop as a group, they will all drop in the same server (well duh...) so it will default to the Global server if even one of the players has >100 ping, and the North American server if EVERYSINGLE PLAYER in the group has <100 ping.
Does this sound fair to everyone? It is, after all, an immediate fix that would help the North American based players massively at no cost, while not changing life for the rest of us at all. Well, maybe it's a minor improvement for the rest of us. Because now North American gamers can't shoot us before our reaction to their presence makes it through to the Vancouver game server, we'll actually have more of a fighting chance too!
All you need to implement the tempfix are:
- At least two servers, or a single server capable of splitting instances between two groups. I don't know what hardware you guys have on your end.
- A code to ping the user when 'Launch' is clicked - because our ping already shows on Tab, we know you already have this, it's just that it isn't triggered by the launch button yet.
- Based on this ping, a second piece of code. If >100 ping, send to Global waiting queue. If <100 ping, send to North American waiting queue.
- ?????
- PROFIT!
Some particularly offensive players like to insinuate that everyone who has bad lag has a bad connection or a bad computer, but my Alienware m14x and 49 MB/s link show the problem has nothing to do with me, and nothing to do with PGI - and everything to do with lacks of regional servers. Don't even think of complaining about us being hard to hit until you try hitting a 260 ping player when you're 260 ping with ballistics. 520 combined ping + firing delay + bullet speeds = very annoying lagshield. And given how my Gausscat can still hit stuff more than half the time, and how other 250 ping Gausscats can still leg my Jenner, it's clear the lag problem isn't insurmountable with a ridiculous dose of leading the target.
Here's the problem with that area in bold: From what I recall, the servers are in Toronto, as am I. My ping is sometimes 30, 20 and even 10 ms when my roommate isn't using the internet. I'm in the same city as the servers, playing against other North American players with low pings, and even I find the shot delays + rubberbanding + unregistered hits to be not bad, but terrible. I can't imagine how people with pings higher than mine feel. Even with pings as low as mine, the server side will always remind you how bad the gameplay can get