Say a server is situated in the US. I’m in Europe. It says my ping is ~ 160s. Does this mean that a player who is closer to the server can hit and dodge my hits faster because I’m delayed?
In: Technology
It depends how it’s handled.
There are those online games where you are connecting to a server and you’re playing on the server. This means that someone closer to the server will have an advantage. This is because someone closer to the server will get information faster as to what is happening on the server.
Then there are the ones where you play on your own computer and your computer updates the server as to what you did and the server sends you what everyone else did. In this case everyone is actually playing their own littler version of the game and it doesn’t matter if anyone else is closer. If it’s an online First Person Shooter you can have cases where two players shot and killed each other because on their end they shot first.
Edit:
Example of the first one is World of Tanks. Whatever you do you’ll notice there’s a delay between you inputting something and your tank doing it.
Ping is the time it takes for a signal to leave your computer, hit the remote server, and travel back to your computer. It is usually measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second).
A couple factors affect ping times the most:
1. Distance between servers. Electronic signals travel about 30% the speed of light. Light takes about 40ms, round trip, from New York to Paris. But the path through cables is definitely not a straight line, so it actually takes much longer.
2. Network equipment. Your router and all the routers and switches on the way to the server will slow down your signal.
How this affects the game:
It’s up to the game programmers to handle the latency, or the time between when you clicked “fire” and when the server gets the message that you clicked “fire”.
One way that first-person-shooters do this is by remembering where all the players are for a small period of time, say, 200 milliseconds. If the game knows you’re on 160ms ping, then it could compensate for that by registering a “hit” if the other player *was* in the path of your bullet 160ms ago when you clicked “fire”.
This method is not fair and it’s not perfect, and it is one reason some FPS players complain of being “shot around the corner”.
On a very highlevel, yes, you’re spot on. People closer to the server will get info first (see you before you see them) and because of that shoot first and therefore kill you before you kill them.
Now, games generally try to compensate for this by delaying actions. Everyone sees their own animation happen immediately when they click but the action will be delayed for the player with lower ping. If this is not done properly it can backfire and the player with higher ping can actually benefit from it. For example, let’s say you have an average ping of 160 and the other player an average ping of 10. The server can just delay the other player’s action by 160ms and yours by 10ms and if you’re lucky and that specific packet only took 100ms to arrive you actually shoot first!
Another thing highly correlated with ping is loss (packets that do not arrive at the server). Again, what actually happens will depend on the game implementation but typically your gaming is updating the server with your current position and the server is updating your game with everyone else’s, dozens of times per second. If there is no loss you send your positions to the server and everyone sees you moving smoothly from a to b to c to d to e and so on. If loss is high you still send all your positions but some are lost so enemies may see you in point a for a second and then “teleport” directly to point e. This is again a tremendous advantage for the player with high ping and the reason why no one wants to play against people with higher ping: it just adds too much variance to the game.
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