Suggestion: add network stability score to lobby

[PillarOfCreation]

Hi!

Someone mentioned something smart in the FAF chat a few weeks ago that got me thinking. He thought high ping, even ping under 500ms, still correlated with poor network stability and desync probability. In general, a shitty game.

But, rather than going for correlates, could the lobby be altered to show some real measure of network reliability/stability/responsiveness? Perhaps send a big package of changing signals over 20 seconds and see if the source can handle the stream at a constant pace or whether it's choppy.

I am thinking of a feature just like the CPU rating score which I am sure people agree has greatly helped the entire community. It just makes a huge difference when you show new players that their fast computer (or huge investment in a new one) will pay off because they can no longer be forced to play with players with shitty CPUs. We need something similar to make the game comparable to other RTSes on the reliability front. It's too bad that a lot of the problems DO come from the core FA engine which we cannot change, but I am thinking that perhaps some people who are familiar with what is going on during slow, unresponsive, laggy games or during crashes and desyncs, can think of some good measure that could be used and allievate at least some of the situations.

This is an addition: no one is going to be forced to use this measure to discriminate against players. And in some cases, those players with poor scores will be encouraged to actually look at whether their extra apps, viruses or background programs on their PC aren't the cause of all this woe to players. Which is something a lot of lazy laggers probably couldn't care less to do at the moment because their shittiness is concealed from the rest of us. It's so bad for certain players that they nearly always give connectivity/network problems - which forces me to use a blacklist to kick them from lobby ANYWAY so there is no getting-around this problem.

Hoping someone who is good at this stuff can react. Keeping a diary of highly suspected multiple-offending laggers and disconnecters in the community is a stone age solution to this problem. In worst case, display the ping regardless of what it is and let people have information to judge from.

Many thanks,
PillarOfCreation

Edit: grammar.

[Geosearchef]

You cannot measure network stability except for counting previous issues which is not doable due to missing manpower.

Displaying round trip time in lobby is a bad idea as most users don't understand the networking model of the game and will therefore misinterpret this value.

I think this is the wrong approach to this problem. Instead we should focus on fixing the connectivity issues.