I did some testing by jumping around on Portal servers with latencies of 8ms to 200ms today. The higher the latency a server has the less likely you are to get lasered by a console users aim assist and net code single tick kill issues.
A latency range of 110ms to 150ms seemed to put a stop to a lot of the instant one tick kills. The lower you go latency wise, the worse the instant kill ticks become. As you creep up in latencies to around 200ms you don’t see the instant kills from the consoles as much but you do see a lot of around corner and from behind cover kills. So much so in fact, it’s almost unplayable.
One exception to this was a server at 8ms. No players from out of the area were joining in on it with extreme high latency. The network graphs stayed flat until around the end of the game. I didn’t see any lasering or instant kill damage ticks happening until near the end of the game when the average latency started creeping higher from out of the area players joining.
If they could region lock MM or put a max latency limit of 100ms on the MM servers, I really do think it would help the netcode issue until they can fix it.
@SeriousJuJu wrote:If they could region lock MM or put a max latency limit of 100ms on the MM servers, I really do think it would help the netcode issue until they can fix it.
In my experience the MM is region locked.
I'm on West Coast US. Typically ping 22ms to US West servers and 75ms to US East servers.
In BF1 and BFV the MM would place me in US East servers about 50% of the time. Very rarely I'd get placed into Europe servers.
In 600+ matches of BF2042 I have NEVER been placed into a US East server. I've only ever been placed into a US West server.
I suspect this aggressive region locking is contributing to the queue times many are experiencing in low pop regions. Also I believe this apparent region locking goal of MM partly explains why we don't have a server browser.
Open your network performance overlay windows in game and take a look for yourself. Don't just watch your LAT, you need to watch the ALAT average for all the players connected to the server during your entire match.
It’s a lot easier to see issues with the servers when you have an extremely low latency, as in my case. If I’m at a solid 7ms latency the ALAT graph should NOT be maxed out through the top of the box at over 180ms, yet that’s what I’m consistently seeing. I should expect to see an average ALAT around 50ms “at most” if MM was working properly.
A high ALAT would mean there are no region locks on MM or if MM “is” region locked, out of area players are using VPNs to access the game servers. In either case the servers are not doing latency checks before allowing players to join and that’s a very bad thing.
Obviously, players can and are circumventing region locks. Something needs to be done so that the servers check the latency on players throughout the match and kick the users that are over a set limit.
