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
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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