10 replies to this topic

[Plepis]

Being from Brazil myself, i usually play with around 150ms ping regularly.

But lately my ISP has abusing the national regulation agency's law and wrecking my pings up to 200min~400 max.

Having a Hbk-4SP currently, i noticed that leading the ASRM6's shots were a lot tougher, mainly because i haven't adjusted to my lag yet, so i switched to SSRM2's for the time being. I couldn't really trust my 12 missile packs exploding on the mech's chassis as a direct hit, and it did feel like i did nearly no dmg due to lag-shield...

That made me think about how all weapons usually behave under higher ping situations..

Do all direct-fire, not lock-based weapons suffer from lag shield? Which ones, in your game experience with high ping, if any, are more suited to deal with hitting and damaging targets in such situations?

[BlacKcuD]

Medium Pulse Laser does very reliable damage regardless of your latency imho.

[Mithos]

That works for me too. Playing from another continent, beside LRMs and streaks, i found lasers - especially pulse - most reliable.

[Lavrenti]

I'd pretty much agree with what others have said - once you go past LRMs and SSRMs, lasers are the most reliable weapons for high-ping players. Some people use a medium laser as a target indicator - start firing it and sweep it across your target from rear to front, and keep going ahead of it until the reticle turns red to indicate a hit. That in theory tells them how much lead they need for other weapons.

[Kiiyor]

I agree with the above.

Streaks, as listed above, are great. But don't boat too many or (heaven forbid) throw your lot in with the other abominations piloting streak cats or you will obtain second degree burns from all the white hot hate directed at you, no matter where you are in the world.

My ping consistently fluctuates around the 270 mark. It took some getting used to, but I have become fairly proficient with lasers - the beam duration allow me to walk my fire onto a target.

Vanilla lasers are great for scoring -some- damage on a target, due to the aforementioned beam duration.

Pulse lasers are absolutely fantastic when you are able to line up a more reliable shot - i.e. when a mech is walking more or less away from/towards you.

Ballistics? I tried them for quite a while in various forms in a Cataphract. I had the most success with Gauss, using heat vision and zoom to make pretty sparks jump out of stationary little blue blobs, but sucked remorselessly when shooting at anything moving faster than an atlas with a 100 or so rated engine.

I also find I do MUCH better if I gravitate towards high heat efficiency DPS builds, rather than alpha strike monsters; they are far move forgiving towards us ping challenged folk.

[Yastiandrie]

I get roughly 260-320 pings as an Australian and i'd say definitely avoid ballistics

[Koe]

I'm usually getting anywhere from 500-800 pings. High download and crappy upload is the problem here.
Anyone know a good way to get better pings? Seems like it's something on my end, cause Youtube music videos download in about 5-10 seconds

[Hex Pallett]

Just go with LRM.

[Plepis]

Helmstif, on 28 November 2012 - 07:55 PM, said:

Just go with LRM.

That, and boating SSRM's are the two main things i'm desperately trying to avoid, since let's face it, there's only so much skill you can gain relying on lock-on based weapons all the time...

I'm sold on ballistic weapons, unless it's an ideal shot, it'll usually miss, or be caught in lag-shield

I've yet to try pulse lasers, but i'm getting relative success on regular ones... I'm guessing PPC's will suffer from the same issue as ballistic

[Elizander]

Plepis, on 28 November 2012 - 02:20 PM, said:

Being from Brazil myself, i usually play with around 150ms ping regularly.

But lately my ISP has abusing the national regulation agency's law and wrecking my pings up to 200min~400 max.

Having a Hbk-4SP currently, i noticed that leading the ASRM6's shots were a lot tougher, mainly because i haven't adjusted to my lag yet, so i switched to SSRM2's for the time being. I couldn't really trust my 12 missile packs exploding on the mech's chassis as a direct hit, and it did feel like i did nearly no dmg due to lag-shield...

That made me think about how all weapons usually behave under higher ping situations..

Do all direct-fire, not lock-based weapons suffer from lag shield? Which ones, in your game experience with high ping, if any, are more suited to deal with hitting and damaging targets in such situations?

During December the ISPs in the Philippines usually give high bandwidth than normal during the year. Probably to prevent people from switching while they have money.

Default weapons for high ping are lock-on weapons like Streak SRM2 and LRM.

An additional thing you can do is use TAG or lasers to 'lead' the enemy so that you can find out their true location (crosshair turns red when you are aimed on the invisible lagshielded target while firing a weapon).

If you use lasers it's recommended to leave them on chain fire so that you can 'locate' the target but for this purpose TAG is usually better because it causes no heat and fires 100% of the time.

[Tigerhawk71]

Depending on what you define as "High Ping", you can do fine with most weapons.

If your ping is ~200-250 (standard for Aus players like myself) you can do fine with most weapons, you just need to be more careful about when you fire. Given heat management, it usually works out to not be a problem anyway since you rarely fire all your weapons all the time. You just need to think about half a second ahead of where you would if the weapon fired instantly... and beleive me, some of us Aussies have gotten very good at it. It's not so much -where- you fire, but -when- you fire when you have latency. It really does take a lot of work, and you'll find there are times when it's simply not practical to shoot at a particular target.

If your connection is a much higher ping (300+) or is inconsistent, then you're best off with something like Medium Pulses, Streaks and LRMs as suggested - they're either guided or hitscan weapons that deal decent damage and are reasonably efficient.


As for people overseas wanting to improve pings - simply put, there's only so much you can do. Light can only travel so fast, and there's switching times to take into account. You can download a youtube video in like 2 or 3 seconds, but that's not reliant on your ping times, that's reliant on your connection bandwidth. The video content doesn't change in realtime and need to be constantly updated like the games do. If you want to see what i mean, run a ping test to youtube or some other website you download from..

You could try and find out the IP for the mech servers or raise a support ticket for more information and try running some tests with that, but really there's only so much you can do - your barrier is mostly physical distance.

Edited by Tigerhawk71, 29 November 2012 - 07:13 PM.