"he's the one causing all the lag! lets lynch him"

[MichaelSword]

my connection from where I'm staying over the summer tends to be a little iffy. In a recent game, my ping had jumped up in the 200s-300s while pretty much everyone else was < 100. several people (all on the other team coincidentally) started *****ing about "oh that guy is causing the lag" and kept starting votes to kick me. some of them just had that jerkass vibe (no points, just sat around *****ing at people & trolling) but some of them were good players that seemed to seriously believe that my ping was actually somehow slowing them down.

now i'm no computer expert, but i'm gonna be entering my junior year as a comp sci major at a reasonably good college this fall, so i have at least a very basic understanding of computers. personally, i think this "one guy with a slow connection drags everyone else down" is an urban legend. yes, it might have a bit of truth in some (older, less advanced) games, but not so much in a game like bf2 that has a dedicated server. i figure that if my ability to communicate with the central server is a bit slow, that should not have any impact on someone else's ability to contact the server (unless he is affected by the same traffic jam thats bothering me). i'd bet money that the server does something like interpolate the position of someone who is lagging a bit to smooth out their position when telling others where they are. the only person who suffers is the guy with the bad connection, not others.

also, i'd argue that the value of the ping shown in bf2 is often irrelevant. i (and many others i've talked to) have had ping thats very low (< 25) and still have a really bad connection. Likewise, i've had ping in 300 or 400 range and sometimes still be able to pay perfectly fine. dice did not do a good job of giving you feedback on your connection imo

but anyway what do most people think of this "one guy with a bad connection ruins the game for everyone thing?"

[minkes]

That's stupid. You don't get their position until you wait like 300ms and they don't get your position. So the only problem there is on your side. The program tries to interpolate your position, so it shouldn't show so much on their side. The only way possible to slow them down would be if everybody has to make a turn and the server would have to wait until your position comes back. But that would be stupid programming, no modern shooter would use this technique. Some games do, like C&C:Generals, but in a shooter all that counts is the power of the server and how fast he can handle every persons input.
So, people *****ing about you slowing everybody down is stupid newbie talk.
In Germany people get kicked by the server automatically when their ping gets over 150ms for 3 times in a game. But that has to do with the bad experience players get when shooting at somebody which ping is at 450. It looks stupid and annoys people.

[FM_Echo_One]

I rarely see anyone get kicked by voting because you need so many votes to make it happen. People rarely vote anyway.

[BigBadBob]

i don't know about this. I know on our servers we've had a person pining in the 300-400 range, and everyone was getting a little lag (none before that person came in) and we kicked him, as soon as he was gone, the lag was gone.

This has happened several times with differnt people.

I rarely see anyone get kicked by voting because you need so many votes to make it happen. People rarely vote anyway.

I have the option enabled to opt-out of voting. Only 1 out of every 50 votes is a good idea, most of the time someone votes to kick someone because they got owned, or that person keeps using the tank and they want to, even though the one uses it is good, and the one time they get it, they can't make it out of base without running over 2 teammates or running into something and damaging themselves badly.

[ud!t]

you're absolutely right: one guy with a slow connection does NOT lag other people in the server. All it means is that it is laggy for the person who actually has the lag (obviously) and they might be hard to hit because they are lagging.

But you don't get lag if other people are lagging, I feel sorry for people with dialup who get kicked because people think they are lagging the server when they actually aren't

[MindBlowing]

I've joined servers with 50% of players above 200 of ping and I didn't lag but it's annoying to shoot them down as they are warping so that might explain the kick vote. They don't lag but they see you lagging !

[j4k3]

over 300 can affect a server especially if 99.99% of the other players' ping is below 100. not that much but enough to cause a li'l lag every second or two.

[toXicRabbit]

my average ping is 200-400+ and people love me o.O actually all i can do to gain alot of score is to be commander.

[imported_TheDragon]

i did some extensive testing
i usually get ping less than 100
and on our clan sever - almost always = 84
but the tests i did, was purposefully join games
where ping was over 250
saw little to no effect
i wonder what the effect of BANDWIDTH has on the game, or the ability of the mtu connections to handle the dataflow
i upgrade from 1.5 dls to 3.0 and saw little effect as well

i play lag free 99.9%
and when I do experiecne it on certain servers
EVERYONE else is complaining also
so, i tend to think the lag problems is server related (either it's throughput or computation issues - eg perhaps too many games for too many clients??)

[darkarchon22]

I dont like it when people try to kick because of someone's ping, but there are good reasons to kick people some times. The proble is that if you start a kick vote for someone on your team, it takes more yes votes than there are the # of players on the team. The other problem is that to many people have the "opt out of voting" option turned on.

[rombaft]

one person with high lag effects the other players, not in a phisical way but it's caused by the netcode.

I don't want to explain it here because it's a whole thing to explain, look it up on google or something, this is why you get flamed a lot

[Munchies]

One person with ~200 ping does not effect the server, you'll need to have something like 5 people with 300+ ping for others to start lagging too.

[Version2]

I ve played in a srvr with 16 people and 9 had pings near the 500 s and 6 of use has them in the low 100s and 1 guy on the extremely low 15 s. And the lag was non existent. Everything ran smoothly and fine. The onyl thing that was laggy was when killing them, the bullets would hit them and then they would register dead in the text and then die a few seconds later.

BAD pings only affect those that have them imo.

[Thelron]

I'd have a hard time believing that they didn't build a decent bit of interpolation into the game, the only way a high ping should noticably affect someone other than the person themselves is if they're riding in your vehicle, or if the server itself is already overloaded (in which case everyone's going to have problems anyway).

[Retribution.]

one thing that does pee me off is people that keep going on and on about the high pingers on the server then starting vote kicks and spamming chat some more

**** off and die.