lol @ you nitpicking down to this level. It's ok though, I'm fine with it.

Clientside HD doesn't favor anyone. Serverside HD does. The problem doesn't have to do with clientside hd suddenly changing it's behaviour due to a player's lag, it has to do with a player becomming hard to hit because he's blinking all over the spar with random bursts of speed. This thread isn't about hit detection and changing it to serverside isn't a viable solution.

In the vast majority of the spars on UN lag isn't an issue. There will always be latency, but it only becomes a problem when the other player is excessively lagging. Even then it varies but what we consider "excessive"/unacceptable is a completely different issue. The matter at hand is whether UN is willing to put their foot down, at their own descretion, and disqualify these people from our competitive tournies and events.

I said earlier I support excluding players from events based on the reasonable opinion of a staff member. I'm against arbitrary ping limits, which seems to be what the OP was suggesting. We even have a guideline on Era for Events Team members that players with 300 MS or more of "lag" can be removed if they're excessively disrupting the event.

I'm pretty sure Rufus means this too. 500ms and above is pretty much given but is there a way to measure player skipping and whatnot?

Sooo.... if the limit was 500 MS and it was TTUTC/UTC finals, the guy is about to win than all of the sudden the server spikes and everyone goes to 10k MS, the player would be kicked? IMO, I'd rage.

A limit isn't necessary. Chakrah has 23 Event wins, so I really don't see what the problem is. In a spar, if you're going to complain when you lose, than just don't spar him.

No. Everyone seems to be jumping to conclusions here.

A lot of the discussion here is trying to find a solution to the problem, not necessarily trying to use a system that we've already tried and proven faulty.

Event wins aren't counted in team events, where his lag is causing a lot of problems (i.e. FreezeTag, TTPK)

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The PR Admin, both GP Admins and the ET Admin all agree that it's an unfair advantage, and that players with excessive lag should be disallowed from participating in certain activities.

That being said, it sort of changes the nature of the thread. The question is no longer whether or not we should disallow people with excessive lag, but how.

I'm in favour of coreys' idea, where it'll be up to the ET/GP/Spar Mods discretion. We had this system in place a year or two ago, and only 2 players were banned for an extended period of time due to lag.(eagle4 and BlobZ)

Banned for lagging? What the ****?

Sorry. UN has ban features for both events and spars, and thats what I was referring to.

....

Serverside HD is a horrible idea, as is the suggestion of averaging out a player's latency via ping over a period of time and then just barring them from events and such if it's over a certain MS (gotta give credit to who thought this up!). Player latency is already bad enough without considering the server's - making something like this will only end in player genocide if the server hiccups. How is Server HD going to make this better? It only resets the argument that rewards players with closer/faster connections to the server and gives them an advantage over others. Isn't that pretty much the same thing as were talking about right now?

UDP is frowned upon because Graal's protocol for it sucks, and players like me who are stuck behind a router have a hard enough time already trying not to fart without the server throwing us around all over the place (I can't open a port to keep packets bouncing off my router).

lol on era one time I was torrenting and there was a huge raid, I lagged out in the elevator and sat there holding D with PBP, I got like 20 kills 1 death over and over again because half the time they couldn't even see me it was so bad

I remember a time where 56k was considered fast, we should have banned all those 28kers when we had a chance!

That is because damage from guns is handled clientside. You don't take damage from guns unless you see the bullet hit you on your own screen.

Melee is serverside though, so if somebody ran up beside you they could punch you to death before you even realised they were there hitting you. It takes about 6 seconds for somebody with an axe to kill you if you're standing still. If you're lagging, keep moving.

All healing is handled serverside though. So you'll get warped to the hospital and still have 0 health until the serverside catches up and you'll just keep dying, over and over again.
I don't have terrible lag (about 400ms average) and sometimes when I die I get about 3 or 4 deaths.

Because of the mixed damage system lag isn't as much of an issue on Era as it is on UN, and then even on UN it only matters for players who actually skip around the screen. Laggers who move fluidly the whole time and just delay aren't that much trouble because you can see where they're going and slash infront of them.

the main problem is not that players lag; it's the players who lag for long periods of time that create the unfair advantage, whether intentional of not

this is essentially the problem, and great care has to be taken into consideration in dealing with this (assuming we are actually going to deal with it right now)

i'll explain the difference. when someone can control their ping, especially during events/sparring, then you realize that they are lagging on purpose. when someone is constantly lagging no matter what they are doing, then it can have the appearance of legitimacy. both cause problems, in that laggy players, who albeit are beatable at least in sparring and to a lesser extent in events, take a certain type of "playing" in order to achieve it, and it's ridiculous when these players get any sort of lag spike where you just suddenly get hit 4-5 times in a row with literally no control over it

this is true, because the problem stays the same whether being intentional or not, so the solution must affect all laggers

chakrah is the new torrent except not as cool (jk (8)

just because it's always been a problem doesn't mean we couldn't manage something in the ways of controlling it, or equalizing it for the fairness of the large majority of players who do not lag. so here is the question: should we really care about this argument of players not being able to get high speed internet?

let's say we do: if yes, then we have to implement a very opinionated and somewhat corruptible system of circumstantial policing. if there is any evidence of a player abusing the ability to make themselves lag then they can be banned from events/sparring for a period of time. players who constantly lag can be allowed, but if any changes to their lag at some point occurs (they do not keep up a constant lag) then they can be banned in a similar fashion to the above. obviously things like lag spikes will be taken into consideration, as we want to allow everyone to play regardless of how they lag

let's say we don't: if no, then we implement a lag threshold that can be flexible enough to allow a lag spike but throughout enough to weed out the constant/intentional laggers. this means there isn't a bias in the decision: even if you lag spike and get kicked, you went over the lag limit so you lose. even if you live in a location where you cannot get a solid internet connection, to bad: you went over the lag limit, so do what you can to get a better connection. to make this more fair (as it seems pretty harsh right now) we could allow exceptions to the limit, depending on just how laggy the person is. if someone just has a spike every 5 minutes that kicks him off but is a solid 50MS the entire rest of the time, we can obviously let him slip by so he can continue playing. maintaining a 300MS is a bit more troublesome, because that's so large a lag that it can lead to an unusual raise and ease to winning, so perhaps an exception but a banning from certain events/sparring tournaments would allow the player to continue playing but not cheapen the win when it counts

fact of the matter is, the majority of players do not lag: we cannot lessen their experience (which is how it's supposed to be experienced) for the (very) few laggers who get screwed over by lame internet companies

I consider that more of a emulation of lag instead of true latency, like if I were to download a program of sorts that controlled the outflow of packets I could appear to be lagging but not in it's true entire definition, which is what I'm assuming we've been talking about here. Emulation isn't really a problem because that's obviously cheating and we all know what to do with cheaters around here :cool:

There's people who lag at no fault, people who lag and are jerks about it, and people who cheat using exploits/3rd party programs. If you don't define this then you run into a problem of ambiguity...

Would be neat if there were specific areas of spar limited by latency. 40ms and below zone one, 41-100ms for zone two, and 101ms+ are zone three.

How is it frowned upon when the majority of UN (according to one statistic) is using it? Slowly more and more people are realizing that forwarding a port isn't exactly difficult and there are only a few who actually have problems with it. When two players are sparring with UDP on it's silky smooth. :cool:

On clientside HD that isn't really relevant. This is why I'm kind of "eh" about latency. Americans and Europeans can comfortably spar assuming neither have bad connections and both are using UDP(TCP, of course, can make anyone harder to hit and skippy). If two people have 100ms, this doesn't necessarily mean they're both laggy. Hell they're probably both from Europe and thus, because it's clientside HD, extremely smooth with no discernible delay.

You should -not- have to forward a port for UDP. If you do, your router sucks for not automatically doing that, seeing as UDP is one of the major internet protocols.

UDP should be forced - just about every other online game out there uses UDP exclusively, it's the standard for any kind of online play. No other online game I know of lets you choose, that's why they don't have issues like this (because obviously you should never mix protocols like this, or problems arise).

Sounds like segregation.

Impractical if its forced and I believe if it was implemented it would suffer the same fate as the current rate-dependent spar rooms on UN. i.e. Rarely used, if ever.

We have one main spar on Unholy Nation and it has a queue. "Just don't spar laggers!" is not an option, and the majority should not have to just stop sparring because of one or two people. What we currently have is also why ping-specific spars would not work; it is unsociable to place everyone in different rooms, people wouldn't enjoy that. In addition to a spar queue, we also have spar tournament events which participants have no control over. You can't just choose who you want to spar, and that's the way it should be, but players should not have to sit out of these because of one or two people who are abusing lag.

Sparring isn't the only competitive aspect of the server. We have events and Castle Wars, which again you don't have the option to pick your opponents in. Each competitive area has its own dynamic, but all three are generally based upon PVP which changes a lot when you're playing against those with massive lag. Like I said in my opening post, if you are doing something that is unfair to everyone else, you shouldn't be allowed to participate until you are fair.

What is the incentive to attempt to fix the problems you are causing for other people if you're allowed to do what you're doing?

at the same time, you cannot tell legitimate laggers that they cannot play unless we're all willing to get rid of any laggers what-so-ever

If 1 player has an unfair advantage over 10-20 players, yeah you can.

You lag yourself anyways, k?
Besides, half the players on the server intentionally lag themselves to get that unfair edge. So, if you where to add a lag cap to events + sparring, than I suppose half the server won't be playing events, nor sparring.
Also, there's the players who warp all over the place or have MASSIVE delay and yet still remain under 100-150 MS.
^_^

Or they'll fix it. :\

The question still is, what if they cant.

Then they are forced to stop being wretched spoiled brats, and perhaps they also finally accept that sometimes they must sacrifice their own ill-begotten fortune for the sake of 97% of the population.

stfu chakrah, you're not helping your cause

They paid for the game just as much as that 97% did.

3% paid as much as 97%?! I think you need to invest in a new calculator, dude. But really, that's not even the point.

Individual rights only extend as far as the next individual. This pertains to the Internet and in real life. You are generally allowed to do what you want so long as it does not negatively affect someone else. Once a single player begins interfering with other players' experiences, that person must be handled. It's as simple as that. Whether this person can 'help' their abuse of the system should not even come into question--it's 100% irrelevant.

A player is negatively affecting many other players. That is all you need to know.

lern2math :noob:

If you buy an online game knowing that you have a ****ty connection, then that's just a bad investment on your part. Lagging on most online games usually makes it unbearable for you to play, not everyone else. Why should UN make the majority of its players suffer for the stupidity of a few?

Sure, laggers bought the game and have a right to play, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be certain requirements for events and tournaments (i.e. low ping).

Not in volume. They paid the same as any of those 97% individually for the game. I think you know what I meant.

The solution is not to deny service to the paying customer.

Good question. Why do they? I've suggested solutions such as serverside hit detection, which would make it completely fair based on connection speed, but they've been shot down by people who said, gasp, that this would be unfair to laggers.

I can't be bothered to read this whole thread, so this solution may have already been mentioned, but what should be done is using triggerclient and triggerserver to get a glimpse at how many packets are dropped over time. Lag, as in latency or ping, isn't the real problem, it's packets being dropped, then being resent or being lost altogether, provided it's UDP, so that way the sword swings don't occur as often, or in strange positions and directions. Check how many triggerclients and triggerservers are dropped, and if the amount is too great, it's a truly intentional cheater.

As far as latency goes, one thing you can do, if you're willing to do a rather large rewrite of the collision and movement systems, is store old player positions in arrays, then use timevar2 to match up the position of when the player pressed the sword button to exactly where both of them were at that point in time, by actually taking a few steps back in time. This is how many modern first person shooters handle lag compensation.

But I don't think you know what I mean. If 97% of paying customers are being denied good service in a game, why should the 3% of players denying them good service be favored?

Because they also paid.

So did hackers.

But hackers broke the rules, unlike laggers.

This. You cannot compare them unless you can definitively prove somebody is intentionally lagging themselves to gain that advantage.

Why are there rules against hackers? The majority of hackers are not using their hacks to actively disadvantage every other player; they are using their hacks to actively advantage their player. That is exactly what lag does.

If a person encountered a glitch on a server that allowed their player to have an advantage over other players (unlimited ammo/money, extra items, being a little faster, etc.), then this glitch would be corrected. Or at least I would hope it would. But.. but why? That's not fair to the player. He found the glitch fair and square!! He didn't do anything wrong, so why should his advantage be taken away? Because it's unfair to everyone else.

The fact that lag offers an advantage over other players is a glitch in Graal, and it needs to be fixed.

I was ignoring this thread until I got cheated out of an event win because the ET was bros with Chakrah and his lag.

Screw you UN.

...what? Graal and other online games are built around competition. By giving themselves unfair advantages they are removing an advantage from others.

And yes, lag can give players an unfair advantage, but the difference between lagging and hacking is that laggers have no control over their lag. Is it really so hard to understand that? Sure, there are people who take advantage of their lag, or even purposefully lag, but there are also honest people with poor connections who would be locked out of a game they paid for.

Perfect logic right here folks. How come Era kicks laggy players? You never responded.