How do some games like Monster Hunter, or even mobile games like Underlords, allow for players all over the globe to play together seamlessly but other games like Dota has horrible lag and ping when you play outside your region?

Question

How do some games like Monster Hunter, or even mobile games like Underlords, allow for players all over the globe to play together seamlessly but other games like Dota has horrible lag and ping when you play outside your region?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Having played all 3. I can explain

For monster hunter world, the game is a lot easier for client side prediction. Monster moves in a very static way and generally doesn’t get interrupted by most of your action.

Your 3 other friends can move in also a limited set of direction and attack. And it’s not as important for client side to be ‘off’ ever so slightly because it doesn’t effect your gameplay.

Static events like gathering and rewards doesn’t require lots of back and forth. So in general net coding the game is a lot lighter and can allow client side to do a lot of correction.

For Underlords it’s even easier, since the only thing you ever care for are whenever client rolls and buy and probably a random seed for the AI to making decision in fighting. If your opponent buys a chess piece, something as high as 1 second discrepancy will not be noticeable. If you roll, than the server can do all the math and tell you which 5 you can buy. There no need for any other info between client/server at this point. The random seed for how the fight is dictated can be given to you at any point for you to see the action.

For Dota, your client side can’t predict much and you require a lot of information between server and client. For a lot of abilities/attack you can cancel at anytime and hitting or missing a spell require a precise x/y, even creeps behavior can’t be predicted since you can force aggro them. Player for server outside of your region would require longer relay of information which if it’s too old it’s useless and tossed out.

To put into perspective, when you lag in monster hunter, you see everything still move but then all of sudden gets corrected/“synched”, for Underlords you don’t really notice for a long while other than button not responding to you. For dota, you “freeze”/“stutter”