Re: Ping is between 6 an 8 ms but always lag

Started playing HUT Champions on Thursday and had to endure three excruciating losses, games which were absolutely unplayable and downright unfair. So I was fed up and started to record the network traffic to get more information.

It's pretty well known that the EA Titles use GVSP (UDP) as the protocol for the Online Gameplay, Fifa uses it as well, they have more servers though. In NHL, I was only able to connect to servers in Stockholm (about 1080km away from my home) and Frankfurt (about 545km). The servers in Stockholm seem to have a range of IP addresses, the server in Frankfurt only has one apparently (is that supposed to be, no load balancing?).

So I started testing searching for games with "Max Avg Ping" 40ms on Friday and Saturday. Was connected to the Stockholm Server, barely won my games, played against a Swede and a Finnish player, connection was not good, but not terrible. Changed "Search Max Avg Ping" to 30ms. Played against a guy and lost even tough I outplayed him, he scored 6 goals in the third period, every shot was a goal. I was surprised that the server had changed to Frankfurt. Changed "Search Max Avg Ping" to 50ms to further test the connection on Saturday 8:30pm. Played against a guy I always lost in the past due to the connection, he usually finished Top 10. This time I won 3:2 (22ms) and got an angry message that EA helped me win the game. Two weeks ago I quit a game against him after getting outscored 2:8 after two periods, it was unplayable.

Afterwards I played against a guy from Germany (27ms) and won 10:7. It was ridiculous, there was no defense possible on both sides. Then, I had a game against a guy from Sweden with 32ms and I knew after two minutes that I would win this game which I did, played smooth and perfect. Was surprised that the server had changed to Stockholm. Today I had another Rivals game which played perfect against a guy from Russia, 30ms on the Swedish server.

For the remaining games I changed the "Search Max Avg Ping" setting to 20ms and I played all my games on the Frankfurt server. None of them had a Average Ping of 20ms, they all had 21,22, highest ping went up to 38ms at times during gameplay. They all played different, in one game I was down 4:1 with 5 minutes to go and won 4:5, some games were extremly slow and I played the German guy again, instead of winning 10:7 I won 4:1, completely different game, way more tight. An opponent send me a message that his players don't turn the way he wants to, he told me was from the UK when I asked him so he probably had a bad connect. The last couple of games had tons of "Packet-Resends", "Range-Errors" and "Block-Dropped" messages in Wireshark for the GVSP traffic as well. But it's all very weird and incoherent, it's very rare that games play perfectly smooth but I can't find a pattern.