acceptable ping time for arma mp?

[RjC_77 0]

Want to pick up playing online again after years of sp.

I was wondering: what kind of ping time is playable?

I noticed on the server screen that my ping just keeps on going up and down between about 50 and 300. Is this playable?

[RjC_77 0]

anybody?

[super64 0]

A ping of 300 will not be very playable. Although, ArmA is the type of game where you can get away with a bit higher ping than you could on other types of FPS games. Im in the US, but are able to join German and other Euro servers with pings of 120 to 160, and still have an enjoyable game. As a golden rule i always try to stay below a ping of 200 when joining a server. Of course, the rule still applies... the lower the better.

[Infam0us 10]

As an example ... most of our clan get a ping of average 60 - 90 And this for them is very playable, however ... you start looking at getting noticeable lag at around 150-200, with 300 being characters just dissapearing off your screen, or shooting someone and they die 5 seconds later ...

this is also very bad in CTF as you kill the enemy only for them to have killed you but for the lag to kill both

Anyway look for a ping of around 50-100 for Smooth Play. Anything over that and you start noticing lag

[benreeper 0]

I usually don't play online (but LAN) because I can't stand lag. So far I've been on servers that in which I had an under 40 ping in the US. This plays very well.

--Ben

[JRMZ 0]

I think max ping is 100 if you want a decent game without lag & desync

[december 0]

I live in Japan and play only MP in England. I have played OFP, VBS1 and now ArmA.

My ping is always between 250 and 300 I have no noticable lag or desync.

I only play coop. You may be at a very slight disadvantage if you play pvp.

I have never heard any of my clan members comment on my ping or connection causing lag.

If you would like to see a 300 lag free ping please come to SES server and I will be happy to show you.

If your members are having problems with lag upto 300 then they either have bad connections or the server isn't upto scratch.

[Maximus_G 0]

I'm GMT+10 and have ping 170-300 on european servers. This is good enough almost in all cases except close-range human-vs-human engagements aka CS-style.

Some Arma server admins think that people having pings>=200 cause lag troubles to others, so they should be kicked. That's not true. It's not about ping, it's about "desync". If you've got a stable channel to the server and ping 300, you'll have a smooth gameplay.

If there's ping 100, but high "desync", there would be lags, small and sometimes big ones.

[december 0]

I agree

If you have a ping of 20 and a bad connection you will have desync which will cause lag.

Ping is mainly about distance from the server and 300 is 300th of a second. That is not going to cause lag.

[general 0]

your bandwith also matters. 150-300 is pretty ok.

Edit*

ups, already said

[[aps]gnat 28]

I suspect BIS's netcode is much improved, I've played with pings of 200-300 with 20+ ppl and unlike OFP, I can hardly even tell I'm at that ping.

Bandwidth is obviously important ..... except I dont monitor that.

[=jps=sgtrock 4]

The effects of ping times on network play. Ah, a subject that I know extremely well. I've been known to blather away on this subject for hours at a time. Cop a squat, young padawans, and prepare to be Enlightened.

I've played shooters over the Internet for what seems like forever. You oldtimers out there may remember a handful of little utilities called tcpsetup, iDOOM, and iFrag that came out in the mid '90s. They allowed playing Doom ][, an IPX based game, over TCP/IP by providing a tunnel that encapsulated the traffic between networks.

This in turn led to playing building to building across college campus networks, then to playing across the Internet. So far as I know, that was the very first time that anyone had the capability to play a shooter that way. I'm not positive, but I think that tcpsetup was also the first tool that provided any kind of TCP/IP connection for a PC running MS-DOS. It was certainly one of the earliest.

A buddy of mine and I had been playing Doom ][ over the corporate LAN on the weekends when we had to come in to do maintenance. When I first found out about iFrag a couple of months after it was first released, I jumped on it. The idea of gaming across the Internet from home sounded like an absolutely wonderful idea! I used to use iFrag to connect to 4 player deathmatch games on a dialup modem at 9600 bps. Yep, back in the Stone Age.

I regarded playing Doom that way as laggy but playable as long as no one used the plasma gun. The plasma gun fired relatively slow moving rounds at the rate approximately 20 rounds per second. Every round's position had to be updated to every player. Combine that with the fact that IPX could be an extremely chatty protocol, and you can imagine the lag effects that created for my gaming. Now, of course, I don't think I could stand anything like that delay.

Anyhow, I naturally developed a bit of an obsession about learning how networks and network protocol design affect game play. I also used to design, install, and maintain networks for a living, so I understand the fundamentals at a level that 99.9% of players simply don't have the background for.

There are four basic factors that affect your online gaming; player reaction time, network delay (best measured in in-game round trip pings), dropped data packets (rarely tracked well in-game), and how well the game engine is written to withstand the impact of the latter two.

Reaction time varies somewhat by individual. However, measurement studies have demonstrated that most people process stimuli in about a tenth of a second, or 100 ms. This matters when you are comparing your ping to everyone else on a server.

For example, assume that you are running at 300 ms and everyone else is at 100 ms or less. This puts you at a real disadvantage because they see you 2 tenths of a second before you see them. Basically, you're dead before you even know they're there. This is why it's important that game servers accurately report all player ping times. (This is one of America's Army failings, btw. It reports your time accurately, but everyone else's is reported as much lower than they actually are.)

Now, assume that everyone is at 200 ms. Great! Parity! However, the lag will be noticeable when firing because you have to lead more than you normally would have to. Not the end of the world, but it does make going from a high ping to low ping server a little difficult to adapt to. It's even worse going the other way, though.

Round trip ping is affected by several factors which are beyond your control. The most obvious is simply the distance between you and a server. There's the speed of light to deal with and propagation delay through all the intervening network equipment.

Propagation delay is by far the bigger component that slows your traffic. That means that the further away a server is in network terms the higher your base ping will be. For example, if your PC is on Comcast's network and your buddy's server is on the local wireless ISP, you might experience a minimum ping over 100 ms even if his server is right next door. Your traffic might be going through a dozen or more routers plus a shared vendor connection that might be hundreds of miles away.

More typically, though, you can figure roughly 70-100 ms for every 1,000 miles or so between you and a server. That's why playing across oceans generally means 200+ ms ping times.

Another factor is the network bandwidth available at the server. Someone attempting to run a server in their house on the end of a DSL link simply won't be able to provide the same level of service as someone who has a server located in an ISP's datacenter.

The last major factors that affect ping times are your client's and the server's ability to process information as it comes in. You can control your own PC, but you are at the mercy of the server admins. If they have set the player count too high, your gaming will suffer. It'll show up first as higher pings, then as dropped packets at the server.

Packet loss. This is what causes what people on this forum call desync. Dropped packets obviously means lost information. As packet loss gets progressively worse, you'll end up with an unusable connection no matter how well the game engine is structured. Packet loss used to be fairly common back in the bad old days of dirty dialup links and over saturated frame relay WAN links. The most common cause today is generally one of two factors. It's either ISPs filtering traffic or overloaded servers. In any case, if you run into it, you're generally best off just dropping that server from your favorites list and finding another more stable one.

The best game engines are designed to be tolerant of both widely varying pings coming from the clients and lost data. However, it's a tough proposition for a game engine like ArmA that wants to scale up to more than 60 players per server. That's especially true when the game server has to track and update clients with the status of more than a million objects! Now, throw in ballistics for Ghu knows how many rounds that may in the air at once, then players who will be doing all kinds of crazy things. It's a wonder that any game engine runs at all!

ArmA takes things a step further, too. It allows for server performance tuning in ways that other games don't by forcing all players to use the same visual settings for selected variables. The single biggest factor that can be affected this way is probably shadows. Shadows can be a critical part of the game play because their presence or lack makes a huge difference in whether or not a player is easily spotted. However, shadows can also be a cause for lag on an underpowered client.

If you've read this entire post, you probably know more about networks than you ever cared to. Now that you are network Jedis, your patience will be rewarded by a few more words of wisdom from your master.

In my long playing experience, I've found that any network game was very playable with no noticeable lag if my own lag stays below 100 ms. If my own lag rises to 150 ms, the affect on my play is noticeable but tolerable. If it rises to 200 ms, lag becomes noticeable enough that I'll drop and look for a closer or less loaded server. However, I will play on a server with up to 250 ms ping if I can't find a closer server. Frankly, I can't wait until I have a selection of solid servers to choose from here in the U.S.

[december 0]

Nice reply, that about sums it up

I only play coop and AI are far slower than real players so I have no worries

[Wildgoose 1]

Nice reply, that about sums it up

I only play coop and AI are far slower than real players so I have no worries

And a 100mb/100mb cable home internet connection always helps eh dec?

[Maddmatt 1]

Since I'm in South Africa, international servers give me a ping of up to 500 .

I realise that it is incredibly high to most people, but most of the time it's playable. I also played GRAW with similar pings with little trouble.

One person having a high ping wont lag up the whole server, the only one it really causes any difficulty for is the person with the high ping.

Sometimes vehicles don't seem to move smoothly, and units may warp a few metres on the odd occasion, but it is mostly playable.

Remember: lag, desync and ping are 3 different things.

[walker 0]

Hi all

I think things in the US will improve a great deal when the US version come out as there will inevitably be a lot of US servers.

The number of European servers is already growing last night I saw about five 60 player Berzerk servers most with pings of between 30 and 90 but one special one with a ping of 15 it was swamped but I managed to get in. That was as well as twenty to thirty 20 player plus servers.

The server was playing great but there was a TK queen problem, two guys deliberately destroying equipment at one sides base and throwing loads of smoke (I think they thought it would slow down the server like in OFP noobs huh)

I am more and more coming to the conclusion that there is a degree of orchestration to this possibly people jealous of how well ArmA is playing on MP on some servers.

I would suggest the makers of Berzerk adds the anti TK lockup function to the mission that way this excelent set of missions wont begin to get a bad rep.

Kind Regards walker

[zaphod 0]

Hi all,

much is done in Berzerk v1.22 and TK-punishment is in work

satchels and mines are now marked in map for player, and limitated to 5 each. It's not possible anymore to place these charges within whole base area and closer than 25 near flags.

Scoring for captures will be added soon, too.

Main target is to get the map package fully stable at version 1.25