Do we really need to know player ping when it doesnt matter?

[Jordy]

Can the ping indicator be removed from the game? Replaced by a green or red box to indicate under or over 500?
As an Australian Im sick of getting kicked for having ~400 ping to everyone. The games that do get lauched run fine. I try to explain to people when they say "Jordy ping over 400 too high" but they are kick happy and just dont listen to reason.
Ive started linking people to UberGeeks post (can be found here viewtopic.php?f=42&t=2055&p=22012&hilit=+lag#p22012) but they usally just kick anyways.
At the very least could Ubers post get posted in the whats new section so more people become informed
Cheers

[Nombringer]

I second this... New Zealander here

[Tango_X]

What causes low simulation speed, brandwith/ping problems and connection problems is radically different from most games.

When someone in the lobby has 400 ping it can mean two things:

• The player lives far away, but he has a good connection and it's not going to be an issue
• The player doesn't live that far away and is experiencing high ping due to connection/brandwith problems already in the lobby and it will get a lot worse when we start playing.

[ZaphodX]

Replaced by a green or red box to indicate under or over 500?

Although I would like to know pings I think this would be good for AU/NZ who get unfairly targeted by ignorant ping nazis.

[eXcalibur]

a friend of mine has "dsl light" internet, which means a 392 kBit/s download rate. his ping is always below 300ms. when we play 1v1 or 2vAI everything is fine, but when a third real person wants to join the game starts to stutter after a couple of minues (repeatedly runs normal for about 3 seconds, then halts for a second).
when he uses another VoIP program than teamspeak 2, he gets really crazy ping spikes (his ping is below 300 until he says something, then the ping increases rapidly to over 1000 and falls below 300 again a second after he has stopped talking).
i have a crappy wireless lan connection, which loses the signal every couple of minutes (this usually lasts from 1 till 10 seconds). my friends and i get an connection lost error, the game pauses automatically and in 95% of all cases gets resumed automatically after my wireless lan connection has found a signal again.

so, ping almost never is the problem unless it is very unstable. an unstable wireless lan is not a problem either (but all people get pissed after a while). a limited bandwidth is a big problem, when you play with too many people. but it easy to notice that...

what is your experience with a bad ping?
when does it start to affect the gameplay?
is 500ms the magic border?
how does it affect the gameplay?

btw, did you try to host your own game and accept all player who have a ping up to 500ms?

[Nombringer]

a friend of mine has "dsl light" internet, which means a 392 kBit/s download rate. his ping is always below 300ms. when we play 1v1 or 2vAI everything is fine, but when a third real person wants to join the game starts to stutter after a couple of minues (repeatedly runs normal for about 3 seconds, then halts for a second).
when he uses another VoIP program than teamspeak 2, he gets really crazy ping spikes (his ping is below 300 until he says something, then the ping increases rapidly to over 1000 and falls below 300 again a second after he has stopped talking).
i have a crappy wireless lan connection, which loses the signal every couple of minutes (this usually lasts from 1 till 10 seconds). my friends and i get an connection lost error, the game pauses automatically and in 95% of all cases gets resumed automatically after my wireless lan connection has found a signal again.

so, ping almost never is the problem unless it is very unstable. an unstable wireless lan is not a problem either (but all people get pissed after a while). a limited bandwidth is a big problem, when you play with too many people. but it easy to notice that...

what is your experience with a bad ping?
when does it start to affect the gameplay?
is 500ms the magic border?
how does it affect the gameplay?

btw, did you try to host your own game and accept all player who have a ping up to 500ms?

Interesting, I have run setons with no lag at 300ms a few times, and I think you will find a lot of oceanic players Internet will fluctuate to that speed. Although I'm basing my assumptions for speed off we get for steam downloads so....

When play 1v1's with ubilaz we generally have 500-600 ping, and while it certainly slowed the game down slightly, it didn't really slow it down more than a slower computer would. And it certainly didn't make it unplayable.

However when I played with someone who's Internet connection was not stable, and had 450 ping, the game slowed to a crawl. Generally when someone has unstable Internet the pings seems to spike into the 0000's

This is all based off my own experiences however, so I don't know if people have had any different things happen in your games. At the end of the day high ping 300+ can mean a number of things, however in my limited experience I would say that almost all cases cause very little problems. It's more commonly a slow computer.

Any other players with different experiences? (No that's not and invitation for ping nazi's)

[Tango_X]

what is your experience with a bad ping?
when does it start to affect the gameplay?
is 500ms the magic border?
how does it affect the gameplay?

When your ping appears to go up due to bad connection, the issue isn't really that your ping is high. The ping is reported all over the place due to the unstable delivery of data, compared to normal, stable connection where the ping will not move much (even if it is high). Ping latency is a very poor way of judging a connection, so usually high ping is not what is affecting gameplay, instead a bad connection is affecting both the gameplay and the ping.

500ms is the border for stable connections.

[ColonelSheppard]

Yeah in gpgnet faq it was saying that a stable connection of 450 is needed

The problem is that for example my friend always laggs hard when playing with australians, but i'm pretty sure i never kicked anybody because of a ping over 400, maybe a gerneral information about this would be good
I actually put it in the help im new thread but not sure how many people care for that

[discoverer2k4]

download speed is not so important, as these values are mostly high enough to play fluently (except your connected over your mobile device)... what you can expect is, 25 kbit/s per player needed for UPLOAD, which is more important (8 players x 25 kbit/s = 200 kbit/s). So ... ping is not everything. If you get a high ping of 400 in the lobby and a good upload speed (>200 kbit/s, which is 0,2 Mbit/s btw) you could have a good chance that the game wont lag. BUT, if the upload is shit and the mass of data increases ingame ... you lag.

I agree, don't tell the real ping number, just show green(0-450), yellow (450-500) and red (> 500). Same for the cpu benchmark.
Best would be to have an bandwith benchmark tested after the cpu benchmark. A result of 100 kbit/s together with a good ping would show yellow as well for example.

but all of this don't safe you from automatic updates, cpu overheat and so on during the game the chance of playing with a black sheep is there... everytime

[Eukanuba]

One of the biggest causes of ping spikes is BitTorrent, that or anything like it will often kill a person's connection. So always make sure that your lagger isn't downloading stuff as this will often sort the problem.

Any stable ping below 500ms should be fine because FA has a half-second input lag which is intentional and used to cover for high pings.