StarCraft Tools *[EK] members must read!*

[Scott]

You definitely don't understand what I'm saying, and it sounds to me like you don't know what latency is either.

Game latency is the delay between when a user performs an action, and when the game acts on that action. Network latency ("lag") is the "ping time" between the host and other players.

It's important to note that a client's actions have to be relayed to all the players via the host, so even if everyones ping is 32ms, there's still 64ms of network latency. It's uncommon for an internet connection to maintain a latency of under 200ms for longer than a few seconds, regardless of the quality of the internet connection. That means that the internet-induced network latency on a SC game, under ideal conditions, will often be higher than 400ms. That's not insubstantial; you can easily blink twice in that period of time.

Heads-up games always perform better because the network latency doesn't double for clients, but still it's enough to blink once!

Game latency is necessary for network games because network latency affects everyone, but it does so unequally - which is exacerbated by the fact that the host has half the latency of everyone else. If you do not set the game latency such that it is always higher than the network latency, then you create a situation where the host has a chance to make game moves earlier than clients do. That gives the host a majorly unfair advantage at mircroing, which is why lan latency is not available for internet games.

To recap: Game latency absorbs network latency. When network latency is higher than game latency, the host is cheating. When in games with more than 2 players, the host is cheating twice as much.

[Bnu-Sorceress]

I gotcha. That makes sense to me.

[fanatacist]

Then why is it the competitive standard if it is "unfair" ? I think there is a mechanism to it that you don't understand or something, because #LL makes muta micro better for ALL players.

[Scott]

When did I say it doesn't affect micro?  A reasonable latency mode synchronizes game time on everyones machine. Without it, a player's micro effectiveness is dramatically influenced by their connection to the host, making the game imbalanced.


For the record, I'm not inclined to care what the competitive standard is among a community of people who think holding f4 makes their maps download faster.

[fanatacist]

When did I say it doesn't affect micro?  A reasonable latency mode synchronizes game time on everyones machine. Without it, a player's micro effectiveness is dramatically influenced by their connection to the host, making the game imbalanced.


For the record, I'm not inclined to care what the competitive standard is among a community of people who think holding f4 makes their maps download faster.

I'm not talking about USEast noobs, I am talking about progamers, proteams, and the competitive ICCup population that play on #LL when they are not in a natural LAN setting. A lot of these people get paid to do what they do, which is play StarCraft, and that's it. There is a whole culture built around this. Do you really think all of these people are ignorant to what you claim to be an inherent advantage to only one player in every game?

[Scott]

I'm not talking about USEast noobs, I am talking about progamers, proteams, and the competitive ICCup population that play on #LL when they are not in a natural LAN setting. A lot of these people get paid to do what they do, which is play StarCraft, and that's it. There is a whole culture built around this.

The very first thing I said is that I believe too much emphasis is put on using a ridiculously low latency mode, which I intended to mean that insufficient emphasis is placed on the consequences of lowering it. My argument that it makes the game imbalanced is irrefutable, but you must also consider the boundaries of that statement: the game only becomes imbalanced if network latency increases beyond game latency. If you can maintain a low latency connection for the full game, then it makes sense to lower the latency. In the middle of the night, for example, you can do this because the network is off peak.

Do you really think all of these people are ignorant to what you claim to be an inherent advantage to only one player in every game?

Professional tournaments that must take place over the internet are intentionally scheduled to occur at off-peak hours because they are not ignorant of the effect.