Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2026
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Posted - 2014.04.09 04:58:00 -
[1] - Quote
Lag switches don't exist in Dust because the servers are hosted by CCP, not a player. Lag switching is when the person hosting the game interrupts the connection, so that he can play without lag and the other players do. If you don't control the server all you do is lag yourself and not anyone else.
The way Dust works is as a battle winds up it looks at where the players are all located and tries to pick a battle server in a location that is central to all of them. So if you're in Europe and your opponent is in Japan the system will, from the sound of it, attempt to place you on a server in North America. These battle servers are all over the world, and two people might have different quality connections to the server...which is not at all dependent on your ISP.
Networking lesson: The internet works like a big tree, where every leaf is a computer or server. When you send a packet out to the server, at every connection of twig / branch a server decides which way to send your packet. Every time this happens we call it a hop. Sometimes these servers don't behave well, or have connection problems of their own...which causes some of your packets to never arrive at their destination. Meanwhile other people in your game don't go through the same route as you and may not rely on that connection. The closer the faulty connection is to the server, the greater the chance that more people in the game will have problems.
So basically there isn't much CCP can do to prevent this since players in Dust aren't segregated based on geographic location. It isn't a lag switch, it's just plain old lag.
I agree though that SSD's provide an unfair advantage in PC / FW. They don't really provide much of an advantage in the middle of a match, but they do let people load into the match and start running toward the objectives up to 12 seconds sooner than anyone with a stock PS3. We actually measured this once when PC was first out. We fought many teams where they had a scout with uplinks and an SSD. He would spawn in and run to the city, and then while we were just barely hitting the ground underneath the MCC they would be spawning in the center and hacking objectives. That's a pretty significant advantage, to be in control of objectives and dug in before the other team arrives at the fight. The solution here is to approach it like other shooters and make players wait for 10 seconds before they can pick their first spawn location. |