EA Lag Compensation Deep Dive

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@OskooI_007 wrote:

I disagree with the statement saying if LOW and HIGH come around a corner at the same time, LOW will see HIGH first. From my experience it's the opposite, HIGH will see LOW first.

Lag compensation favors high ping players in the vast majority of situations. This is due to time syncronization which allows high ping players to time travel further into the future than low ping players.

Essentially this means the server allows HIGH to render more ticks into the future, allowing HIGH to guess what the future might look like. HIGH is essentially shooting LOW from the future.

Time synchronization is the main mechanic behind lag compensation.

https://timonpost.medium.com/game-networking-9-bonus-overwatch-model-4faba078cf05

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Exactly right @OskooI_007 !

Lag Compensation is exactly that.  Compensating the lag for the players that have a HIGH latency, so they still can play in an environment with LOW latency players.  And it is all the other enemy players with LOWer latency that pays the price for it!   Exactly because the lag compensation is artificially placing the HIGH latency players onto the screen of the LOW latency players, all without absolute certainty that they actually are indeed at that location.  Result is that the LOW latency players are shooting at a fata morgana of the HIGH latency players, while they in reality may be somewhere else.

While the opposite is not the case to the same degree for the HIGH latency players, as the LOW latency player locations will always be more true to reality of the physical gameplay of the players.  LOW latency players have a low latency before their true location is confirmed and hence where they are shown to be by server to other players in the game is closer to the true position when the lag compensation/game mechanic calculus have been completed and damage/kills are being determined.

EA tech team is trying to make it sound sweet and good, but fact is that HIGH latency players are making the gaming experience poor for the LOW latency players.  And EA knows this very well, reason why we have not had any player PING score now in the last many games, as EA runs the server parks cheap, so we are bundled up with other HIGH latency far out of region players to play on the same single server box.

We had the option on Community run servers in the past to set a max latency threshold for players to join/not get kicked.  And it was a true delight to play on those!

I ran a survey 1-2 years back to hear the sentiment here on this BF forum across players what latency level they found acceptable to play with enemies on.  The hard stop came already around 80 to max 100ms.  And especially the PC gamers (who knows and played with this option the longest) were the hardest judges on this term.  While console gamers tended to be ok with latencies upwards to max 140-160ms. 

Current state in BF2042 is terrible.  No other word to describe it.  But also driven by the fact that there are simply no longer enough players around to make servers viable across all world regions.  (though one could argue this was exact reason for bringing in the AI soldiers...).  So fact is that we (like me here in Europe with a latency of 16-22ms to European servers) are typically playing with players also joining from e.g. South America and Japan, despite their latencies are up in the 600-1,200 ms range on our European servers.

Good luck to the Lag Compensation to make that look pretty...

Because it ain't !