Input lag

Was 10-2-0 in HUT champions, took me 4 games until I got my 11th win because I had the pleasure to play against Czechs und Slovakian players. Just a small selection of the fun I had:

There were plenty of other fat man lag examples (AI player stopping behind the opposite blueline so that I am offside, player missing wide open net, Koskinen letting in one soft goal other another etc.) but as it's useless to send video to EA I didn't record more.

This had nothing to do with my Ethernet cable, nothing to do with my router, nothing to do with my HDMI cable, nothing to do with my Monitor/TV (tried both) and the game mode. That's your game EA and your netcode!

Take a look at this article by 343 Industries on Halo Infinite and their "desync" problem. If you go to Halo Waypoint then Halo Infinite Forum category the first thread you'll see is an update on Geofiltering and Latency. Practically the same issue we face on NHL. What feels like us skating in mud is like shots not registering or melee not registering on Halo Infinite. It shows the incompetence of EA in an investigative matter. It didn't take long for 343 to figure out the issue there. Both games run on a dedicated server. I just played a guy from Sweden and the input lag was terrible. Clearly he had the advantage because he the game server for our game was catered to his region. It's ridiculous how EA created 4 separate communities and unable to implement cross platform for people to play people closer to their geographic region. BRING BACK P2P CONNECTION and you might not have so much people complaining about this game. 

@prospero99c 

None of these would be connection-related. It would be good to see the Hedman one pulled out more and from a better angle. If he happens to be touching another player, that can prevent the puck from being picked up. The one with the puck launching into the air obviously looks like it shouldn't happen. The lack of movement on the faceoff is odd as well. Thanks for reporting these.

@Nohtan 

Thanks for all those details. Are you lagging when you play Online Versus? That uses a P2P connection.

Another prime example for the lag is this video. It happens a lot in the lag games. If you press the switch player button on defense you will not get the player you expect that is the nearest to the puck, cause the game is behind what happens in realtime. And I have not pressed last man back! At timecode 0:20 i controlled Player No1 and want to switch to Player No.6 who is clearly nearest to the puck but instead the game decides to switch to player No.25. What happens? I want to check with player 6 but insted I drove Player 25 out of position and get a goal against me.

That happens a lot that I get the wrong player that leads to many goals against, trippings and interference calls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX-u45BcX7E

I haven't touched base on this forum in a while, but I figured this "Input Lag" thread would still be hot at the top of the list.

Isn't it crazy how this thread started right about when the game came out back in October, and after over 500 replies and 5 months of back-n-forth EA still doesn't have an answer to the problems that people are having, not to mention the years before this where the same problems have existed but never resolved?

I can't wait until NHL 23 comes out so I have something new to complain about...haha, NOT!!

@Confusion2000 

Friendly games will move to peer to peer. Definitely let us know if you see a difference. You may see an improvement if you're connecting to someone closer to you than playing someone on your closest dedicated server.

Friendly means exhibition game, so people in GWC can play against specific people, doesn't help with rivals or champs.

Also, just because you connect to the closest server doesn't mean that the people you play have that server as their endpoint. I have dumaOs and I see that I connect to AWS east server in VA about 300 miles from me. I play a guy outside Pittsburgh who is about 180 miles away from the Colombus server and 230 miles from Virginia server. We chatted and it turns out I have better internet than him averaging 950 dl, 450 ul and my in game ping shows 15 even though router software shows 30-40 ping and  45ish server tick rate. His ping was 30 and he has 250 dl/50 ul.

I notice a lag that everyone has mentioned here, players slow to react, players slow to switch, etc. and I barely beat him.

AWS has a bunch of edge servers:

This video shows the lag and how big it is. It's from sunday in HUT Champs. I will uploade the complete game to make the shown ping visible and that you will see the sequence from the right game. I have shown the single frames from contoller input to the reactiontime in the game. It's 12 frames delayed. The video is recorded with 29 frames per second. I can send the original video too for all who are intrested (hopefully EA haha). 12/29 frames makes a real delay of 414 ms!!! Not the shown 6 to 10 ms in the EA connetion graph.

Here the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JsqsP4YWk

Here the whole game (it currently is in upload phase):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbC3WwpcnpM

@niccolo91So I followed a lot of what you were saying there, but tick rate isn't something I'm familiar with.

I am curious though about why so many people say "I ONLY have problems with this game." I am one of those people who only have problems with this game. You have any reasons why this seems to be the case for so many players?

For example, not once has my daughter complained about having these stupid EA issues on any of her games, and she's the typical COD, Battlefield, Fortnite, player...you know, other games that test your twitch skills just like this one. She doesn't play sports games at all, but twitch is twitch right?

Also, would you say this is purely a location problem, like if I was able to switch ISPs would I still have the same problems? Is it an ISP problem?  Or would you say it's more a problem with the servers that EA uses in their NHL games?

It just seems really odd that these problems SEEM to have magically shown up when EA built a new game "from the ground up" in NHL 15 for the new PS4, XB1 consoles that came out. That losing tradition has made its way into the PS5 and XBSX as well and it's so frustrating because nobody else makes a competing game.

Just played for the first time since November due to this input lag. Nope, still present as ever. Really unfortunate.

Here is something about tick rate Tick rate: What is it and how can it affect your gaming experience? | nbn (nbnco.com.au)

FIFA people have the same problem, go to their forums and there are even more people there complaining about input lag because more people play FIFA than NHL.

When you are playing an online game vs someone, unless both people have same ISP, decent dl/ul speeds, latency, packet loss, etc. (which statistically never occurs unless you are playing your neighbor with same setup) one person will always have slight advantage. It is less noticeable in less twitchy games or games with high server tick rates or games with multiple players connecting like BRs, and that is why your daughter prob doesn't notice it as much.

Take Warzone for example. You can see some of these streamers have insane 4k dollar PC setups and on-screen display shows that some of them have latency 5-10ms. I connect to WZ on my XBX and I get 40-50ms latency, yet I still can kill that guy sometimes bc everything in the game isn't dependent on the focus of one thing, the puck or ball.

I can be hiding and shoot him in the back or maybe he went aggressive and put himself in vulnerable spot. I can throw a grenade and get a lucky down, someone else can be shooting at him and when he is distracted, I can get a few shots in and kill him etc. But in the gulag 1v1 he probably would kill me 8/10 times and a lot has to due to that connection.

NHL and FIFA are basically a 1v1 in the gulag, and connection is king. The other person seems faster than your guy because he is getting the information slightly sooner than you and responding slightly sooner than you can.

I am not a network person, my cousin works for Amazon in NY as a networking engineer or something, so he gave me his opinion on what is happening. 

Basically said that most traffic is routed towards big interchanges and from their they ride on dedicated AWS connections and unless your hops from your house to those interchanges are bad, latency would be better closer you are to the target region.

Look at the list of AWS datacenters. With all being equal (similar skill, similar players, decent dl/ul etc.)  the closer you are to a datacenter, the more advantage you have. Dl/Ul speeds means very little to online gaming, playing online uses very little band with as opposed to streaming Netflix or downloading a game. Unless you trying to play when 5 other people are online in your house and even then you can get your router to prioritize gaming with DMZ, QoS, reducing buffer bloat, tons of things.

Shifting back to p2p would help, but I don't think we will ever go back to that because IP booters and DDOS etc. P2P benefits me in that if I connect to HabsFan2022 and he obviously has the connection and I prob not going to beat him, maybe next time we connect I get the connection and it will be harder for him.  With dedicated server, every time I connect with him he has significant advantage and that is never going to change.

So what can EA do? I guess upgrade servers to increase tick rate and reducing the amount of maximum buffer between when gameplay information is received by the game and when it is visually rendered on the screen, like they did with FIFA few years back for like a week lol