Questions about lag and ping

[Dragon_Slayer]

For context I live in New Zealand which is even further away than Australia.

Some players are kicking me from lobbies because they think I will lag out the game and I'm getting really sick of it. Not a huge amount of players, most of the time there are no problems, but enough for me to really want to make this post. I am looking for clarification on this from a mod/dev or really anyone who ACTUALLY knows how it all works and knows what they are talking about.

First off, 95% of the games I'm in don't lag at all, everyone is playing the game just fine. In the 5 or so percent of games that do lag I know how to check who is actually lagging the game by opening f11 and looking at the data column and seeing whose data is reaching zero and 98% of the time it is someone else, I think it's only been me hitting 0 data once or twice the entire time i've played faf. There are also times where a player's ping goes over around 500 when it's in the red and that can be the cause of the game not running smoothly.

Also my cpu score is 207, not amazing but generally not enough to cause any problems.

I thought that Forged Alliance had 500ms of built in lag, so that unless someone's ping was over 500 (or fluctuating over 500) there wouldn't actually be any difference in gameplay lag.

I'm going to give 2 examples of lobbies I've joined that have happened within a 3 week period.

The first one is one that I got kicked out of just like an hour ago.
I'm pretty sure that the host was american and when the lobby was full he asked me to go into observer mode to check my ping since I am from NZ and I know that Australians and NZ have a bit of a bad reputation for lagging games. So I go into the observer and one guy says I have 300 ping and another says 350, which I think is completely fine but the host then says something along the lines of "no that's too high, my lobbies always lag when there's an aussie in it" and then I get kicked.

The other example is very similar to the previous example with me joining a lobby and being asked to go to observer to check my ping, this was a while ago so I don't remember where the host was located but I remember the lobby was a normal diverse one with russians and americans and others. So I go into the observer and my ping is around 300 and he is completely fine with that and then we play a game with no lag problems.

I really just want an easy way to convince people in a lobby that I am very unlikely to lag the game, even though I am from NZ. Any help would be appreciated, I also know that I might be wrong with everything I said that's why I'm asking what is actually what and how what causes lag actually works.

[Wesmania]

That's correct, as long as your ping is below 500 it doesn't matter. All commands are applied half a second in the future, as long as they reach everyone in half a second it's all good. Staying consistently below 500 is more important, I don't think the lobby tests for that.

I guess the lobby could more explicitly state that ping below 500 is good? With the ICE adapter as proxy, we could maybe tweak it to test for jitter as well as ping.

[keyser]

well the same way we aren't displaying ping under 500 when you aren't obs, we should do the same with obs. Will look into it at some point.

[E8400-CV]

well the same way we aren't displaying ping under 500 when you aren't obs, we should do the same with obs. Will look into it at some point.

What? More lagger appeasement? That's nonsense. It should stop reporting the average ping and instead use the maximum of a -say- a 3 second period. Or just count up all the excesses above 500.

400 ping is not a problem, but like @Wesmania already said; the problem is individual packets.

The NZ players are often confused with the Australian players; the Austrialians tend to have way shittier connections.

And some combination for countries are generally worse than others. Playing with Europeans and NZ is fine. Add a player from South Africa...

[RedX]

I think there's a lobby mod floating around that shows everybody's ping, I got kicked from a Russian lobby for "300 ping" last week. And I'm American.

You can tell people all day long that 300ms is fine, but idiots are going to be idiots no matter what.

[Katharsas]

Change it to a 99% (or whatever depending on sample rate) worst percentile moving average measurement and put an additional green "Ok" indicator there as long as its under 460, yellow between 470 and 500, red above 500. People need to be able to trust the indicator and they cannot do that if it just measures/shows based on the average.