Care about pings too much? Get off it
A bad practice referred to by some as “Ping Naziism” is sweeping the multiplayer arena (though you won’t hear me referring to it using that phrase). Despite the potentially offensive phrasing, it is a real problem within the community. Perhaps as a response to poor performance, custom game hosts are being increasingly picky about who they let into their games. This frequently means kicking anyone with a ping above, say, 100ms, oftentimes without even so much as an explanation. This practice is very harmful to the community, doesn’t even increase game performance that much if at all, and needs to be stopped immediately.
First, let’s look at some simple physics. Light travels very fast, but not infinitely so, and the Earth is, after all, a big place. It is a simple consequence of physical laws that you’re liable to see pings of up to 200ms when connecting with people on the opposite side of the Earth. There’s nothing anyone can do about that. And in a community as small as Supreme Commander’s, there aren’t enough, say, Australian players to sustain their own incestuous community (and by incestuous I mean Australian players only playing each other), so they need to be able to play with others. And besides, who wants to keep playing against the same small group of players over and over? There’s no reason you should only play people who are geographically close to you.
At this point it is important to point out the difference between bandwidth and latency. Latency is basically the length of the data pipe (the longer it is, the more time it takes to get from one end to the other). Bandwidth is the diameter of the data pipe. You could connect to someone really close to you who has really low latency, but if they don’t have a broadband connection, the game is going to play terribly, because Supreme Commander simply needs more than 56 kilobits per second of data transfer to keep all players synced when the battle starts getting hot and heavy.
Supreme Commander is not a first person shooter. In a first person shooter, a ping of 200ms is a bad thing, and gameplay would likely suffer. But Supreme Commander is a real time strategy game, and 200ms doesn’t really affect it in the least. Unless pings are approaching a half second or higher, they aren’t going to be impacting gameplay. All of those times you’ve ever been in a really stuttering/lagging multiplayer game, the culprit has been insufficient bandwidth, not too-high latency. Of course, the effects are masked somewhat, because if someone forgets to shut down their dozen porn downloads before running Supreme Commander, then the clogging of all those packets in the pipe will drive up the latency too. But there’s no reason someone with 200ms ping and good bandwidth can’t play a completely lag-free game. Yes, it might take the packets 200ms to arrive, but at least they’re all arriving on time, and so the game won’t get sluggish.
The biggest reason that being overly finnicky with ping times needs to stop, though, is because it is harming the community. The community is already small enough already; it simply doesn’t make sense to point to a large swath of players who, through no fault of their own, live at a good distance geographically, and arbitrarily say, “No, you can’t play with me.” Even worse is when players are unceremoniously kicked from custom games without so much as an explanation. Look at the case of Kitro, a player from Australia with a good broadband connection who was booted from custom game after custom game for thirty minutes. Do you think this is good for the community? Do you think he’s having a good experience playing Supreme Commander? Does this make it more or less likely that he’ll stick around?
Benny Moore is another player who has been repeatedly kicked from multiplayer games. The reason? He had a 150ms ping. That’s not a bad ping by any measure. I implore everyone hosting custom games to stop this ping foolishness at once. I only briefly skimmed through the forums and I found two disgusting tales of gamers unable to play because hosts were too picky. There are easily hundreds more out there just like them who simply didn’t bother to post to the forums before leaving the community for good. What percentage of players do you think can rarely play a custom game because they’re always getting booted? Is it really in our best interests to be so prejudiced against them?
So stop kicking other players often, and if you really must kick one (for a good reason of course, not 200ms ping), be sure to give an explanation first. It’s incredibly rude to boot someone from your game without even offering up an explanation. I always let people know why they’re getting the boot. Usually it’s along the lines of, “I’m sorry, but you don’t have this custom map downloaded, and you need it to play,” or, “I’m sorry, but I have a friend on the way and I need to open up a slot for him.” See, if you explain it like that, they won’t mind so much, and they won’t think you’re a rude asshat.
June 4th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Completely agree with you, though you’re probably preaching to the choir here.
June 4th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
SupCom forces a netlag of 0.5 so nothing below 500 can possibly make a difference. At all.
June 4th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
It really depends on what kind of game you’re playing. If you’re on, say, a 1v1 match, then even a 400 ping is OK. There isn’t all too much information traveling between you. 2v2, peopole usually accept up to 300, no more. I love to play 4v4 though, and this is where ping naziism occurs. Anything above 150 is never allowed, and beleive me, it helps. Doubtless, you all should know that too. E.g.: Your commander is moving from point A to point B. When 2 people have a ping of 250 to you, then your commander is going to freeze every couple of seconds. The whole GAME will freeze every couple of seconds. That’s why we either A) need better network code, or B) need to practice pin *******.
June 4th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Good point. I live in Brazil, and my ping to US or Europe is aways somewhere around 200-250ms, making extremely difficult for me to get accepted in a custom game. My ping isn’t an issue at all, my ranked games are flawless, (I have 2 Mb broadband) I can’t notice any lag most of the time, and when it occurs, it’s likely due to something else. And I feel really bad when people simply boot me with no explanation at all, it’s been a while since my last custom game because of that. Great post!
June 4th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I agree with the gist of the article: kicking people without explanation for high pings does harm the community. I haven’t actually experimented with it, but from my years of experience with online gaming, I will admit I’m pretty cautious about pings around 200ms. Now, if it’s true that SupCom forces a netlag of .5 seconds (500 milliseconds), then by no means can any pings below 500 be harmful, but I do think most internet gamers are used to 200 milliseconds being pretty high. They’re probably not just being cruel by kicking high pingers, they probably simply don’t know it’s acceptable. I know for first person shooters I can notice a difference between a 50 ms server and an 80 ms server.
June 4th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
I don’t think I’ve ever kicked anyone on a ping basis. I’ve kicked for using black as an army color but never ping. I encountered a lot of jitteryness from playing someone in Russia once but other than that things have been fine. I get a 100+ ping connecting to people within this country, and while that’s weird on its own since that doesn’t happen in other games, it’s not kick worthy in the least.
June 4th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
Post this everywhere cyde! i am an aussie so unless i can find a aus/nz custom is pretty much an insta /kick. from what ive heard on the gpg forums any ping under 500 isnt noticeable due to some inbuilt delay. i typically get 200-300 to EU/US games but its still to high for the ping nazis!
June 5th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Spud: Feel free to link it as widely as you wish. Post it in the forums, in GPGnet chat, etc. I don’t mind getting more traffic at all.
And T2A`, what’s wrong with black as an army color anyway? Too hard to see against the landscape on some maps?
June 5th, 2007 at 1:54 am
The reason that pings in this game seem high might have to do with the fact that some games only display the time it takes the packet to travel one way. That is half the trip, while this game might be measuring round-trip time. This is nothing more than a cosmetic difference, and quite frankly I wish that GPG would remove the ping display entirely. Replace it with something more meaningful, like colors based on bandwidth, ping, and performance. Giving the players just a numerical ping display to try and weed out connection issues is asking for trouble.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:14 am
@Clyde:
The problem with black is not the landscape, but the units in the tactical view. The unit symbols are basically black on black, so you just see the shape, but not what specific unit it is – eg, a T1 Eng, T1 Light Ari and T1 mobile AA all look the same. Yes, you can see the difference by looking very close, but it often costs you some valuable seconds. At a quick glance, you see just a buch of black stuff moving around, while with the other colors, you immediatly recognize the different unit types.
Army color black would be finde if the unit type symbols would be white so you would get a good contrast.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:42 am
@CovertJaguar- how does this one-way ping work? how do you know when the packet has arrived? :)
I wish you said up to 400ms Cyde :P That is my typical AUS->US/EU ping experience
I have played some flawlessly smooth games with players around this ping bracket, and some unplayably slow games with all players under 100ms due to underpowered computers. As SoS has said on the forums with the net_lag default the minimum response time of the game is 500ms.
As long as the large ping is constant and is just caused by distance and not because the person has a poor connection/is leeching,
June 5th, 2007 at 7:44 am
er.. and the rest of the comment:
June 5th, 2007 at 7:46 am
it would seem a less-than sign breaks the comment. feel free to merge these if you can CW.
ping under 500 is fine. Lacking system grunt is far more troublesome.
Really the lobby display needs to reflect system performance instead with some simple synthetic benchmark score, and maybe a tortoise/red flag for pings over 500.
June 5th, 2007 at 8:32 am
another Aussy here, btw there are quite a few of us supcom fans down here. I don’t find it 2 hard to find a Aus game. Know what u mean tho.. If only there was a way 2 display the other guys system store instead of ping ;)
June 6th, 2007 at 11:53 am
The real issue is the lack of education : People think latency and bandwidth are equal, which is false. Yes very high latency could become a problem, but the most important is bandwidth and especially bandwidth for upload which sometimes is not large enough. Supcom really seems to make a lot of information to travel ………. and when you’re playing a 4v4 game it means you have to do send the same info to 7 people ! someone having a basic 16ko/s upload would only have ~2ko/s for one player ! it may not be enough for supcom.
June 6th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
I don’t host games often but next time i do i will advertise it as “accepting pings less than 500″
maybe if all those people who understand the ping/bandwidth thing start doing the same then the idea will spread a bit faster, especially once people have played a few of these games and see that it doesn’t make a difference.
or maybe i’ll just end up with nobody joining my games. only time will tell
(please delete the previous comment, less than signs do end the post!)
June 7th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
well im in australia too and ive gotta say pings less then 450-500 dont make a diffrence in the game….
if u type into the console ren_shownetworkstats u will see what happens to ping times and WHO is slowing down the game MOSTLY it either someone with not enough bandwith OR someone with a crap PC….
ive plaid 7 player games with pings over 500 and it works fine….
and ive spent 30min looking for games and being ping kicked for the whole 30min to finaly go play a ranked game where pplz cant COMPLAIN about ping times!!!
June 28th, 2007 at 3:12 am
crazy guy, you need to get off your high horse. It doesn’t MATTER how good pings are. Sometimes bandwidth will suffer, even with pings below 100. I once played a game where all the pings were in the double digits. The game still froze constantly. You know what the problem was? My router was on the verge of dying, so bandwidth was suffering.
Bandwidth is how MUCH information can travel through the pipeline at any one time. If you have terrible bandwidth, then yeah a ping of 250 is going to suck, because the game is trying to send the same information through a tiny pipe, and if it takes .25 seconds to get there, then you experience lag. A guy with _DIALUP_ could have a ping of 95, but he’s going to make you lag because his bandwidth is the size of a straw.
Now, since supcom forces a netlag of half a second, then ALL PINGS BELOW 500 ARE FORCED TO INCREASE TO 500 AUTOMATICALLY, it does not matter HOW many players you have. The example of an 8-player game, one of your dudes probably had a single core! If your game is stuttering, it is not due to ping unless it’s really over 500.
So stop with the ping kicking. It makes no difference and it makes you look like a fool to people in the know. I make it a habit of leaving games where ping nazis kick others for having a ping too high, and I always let them know why.
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Garage Door Parts…
I always thought that was true until I talked to my brother. He has a different opinion….