Gamers in Hawaii Can't Compete Because of Latency

Megalith

Megalith

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Gaming at the pro level is difficult enough, but for Hawaiians, it’s especially tough due to geography and their distance away from many servers. League of Legends players who play competitively, for example, have plenty to complain about: that game has only one server in the US, and it’s way out in Chicago. This is an article that makes you think about the physicality of the Internet and how some gamers have to pull off moves far in advance to counter unavoidable ping.

He had to learn how to “see into the future,” he said, and predict and input moves in advance. Elento likens the scenario to that of a football player, but “instead of being a regular football player, he has to close his eyes for a quarter of a second for every second, and he has to judge all of his decisions based on information he knew before, and he has to just plug in the information for the last quarter of a second.” Gamers playing on high latency develop a “sixth sense” for how to do this, Elento said. When he was growing up in Honolulu, he had an online friend in Australia whose latency was even worse. Yet they both made it to the pro level. “It’s honestly just annoying,” he said. “It’s an obvious competitive disadvantage, but it’s not like it’s unplayable.”
 
oh what about the poor peeps in Asia that are far from the servers as well? lol...
 
If you're gaming as a profession, travel to where you can play.

Think of pro sports players/coaches, they live all over the world, but they still have to travel to where the games are played.
 
Soon they won't even notice; what with the brain eating parasites they have there and all.
 
If your trying to be competitive, either move or deal with it and work around it as best you can. Of course, companies should shrive to expand their servers to where their players are. For League not to have a West, East, and Central hub is a little puzzling. With that said, this article on their network infrastructure illustrates why they have one NA server location.
 
Plenty of games have servers in places other than Chicago and Dallas. Maybe League of Legends needs to get with the times?
 
Q4l1PE4.jpg
 
It depends on the game to a large extent, but assuming that the benefits and detriments of lag more or less cancel out from a gameplay perspective (although in general lag is likely to hurt you in client-server and help you in peer-to-peer), the person who is always laggy will still have an advantage. As the Hawaiian gamer states, he has to learn to "see into the future" out of necessity. But for the person where lag is the exception and not the norm, they don't really develop that ability, at least not to nearly the same extent.

tl;dr the chronic lagger only needs how to learn how to play in a laggy environment, while players with good connections can't make any assumption regarding latency.
 
auntjemima said:
I spent all of my childhood playing Quake with a 300 ping. Suck it up.
Click to expand...

Friggen exactly!
I live in New Zealand...which is likely worse most of the time than Hawaii. Do I give a fark...no.
I guess their main issue is they only have one group of servers to play on that are remote, but with the stuff I play, I've normally got a range of servers available, so I tend to choose ones that aren't too far away from me (although that's all relative really).
....I might write up an article though crying about why my lap times at Bathurst aren't fair compared to other people, as I'm victimised by my physical location...
...lol...
 
Christ what a bunch of babies. I did this regularly during the late 90's playing Q2 CTF with my clan on dial-up. It was the norm... You had to take into account lag if you wanted to play competitively then as well.
 
auntjemima said:
I spent all of my childhood playing Quake with a 300 ping. Suck it up.
Click to expand...

And correct me if I'm wrong, but i find that many games today give benefit to the player with a high ping over the one with a low ping. (Or at least an inverse bell curve). Built in lag-switch
 
Here in Australia my latency in WoW on an average day used to be anywhere between 250 and 400ms. On a bad day it was several seconds. Boo hoo for the Hawaiians.
 
lol +1 so much winning in this thread.

like go play with a shark in the ocean or maybe do a chick on the beach complaining about high pings sitting inside when you live on one of the prettiest places on earth.

GTFO!
 
Yeah, these people have no damn room to complain. I live in North East Ohio where six to seven months out of the year we have shit weather. You really have no damn room to complain.

I was there for a week and a half in Honolulu and it was absolutely gorgeous. Words can't describe the absolute beauty that is Hawaii. Yeah... you have no damn room to complain.
 
I try to not be snarky about First-World problems, but yeah . . . I'll make an exception in this case. Smallest violin.
 
This is no different than when people couldn't get broadband to their homes and had to play over dial up while the rest of the counter strike team had silky cable face sniping ping. I wouldn't move to Hawaii to become a professional skier either, so tough shit.
 
Most western games the best latency I can achieve in Hawaii is in the 60ms-70ms range to west coast based servers.

That being said being in Hawaii is nice if you are into playing Korean/Japanese based games due to obvious reasons.

It does suck though for games hosted on east cost because the best latency you can achieve is in the 120-140ms range which is too high for any twitchy game.
 
Yup, this article is some more first world problems bullshit. It's been 60-70 ms for the last 16 years I've lived here.

Like anyone but a kid living at home could spend 50 hours a week on a game instead of working for obscene rent and food costs.

You should see how they cry when they get gigabit service and it's no better. lol.
 
and what do these precious Hawaiian snowflakes expect? the entire gaming industry to code some sort of lag compensation routine so they don't feel so behind?

Fuck em' if you want to competitively game, don't live in Hawaii. I'd love to try ice fishing and skiing, but I live in Texas, so I fully accept it's not in the cards. Are we really getting to the point in this world where kids (face it they aren't adults if they can't understand) will whine and bitch because of physics these days?
 
otherweeb said:
Plenty of games have servers in places other than Chicago and Dallas. Maybe League of Legends needs to get with the times?
Click to expand...

They had servers in California previously. This made east coast pings "high". They moved to Chicago to centralize the servers and balance pings for everyone as the servers handle North America, not just the US. Hawaii suffered in this change, however everyone else on the east coast benefited.
 
Plenty of players in bumfark nowhere with shiatty intarwebs providers (and that's their only choice) have terrible pings.
 
If I lived in Hawaii, you know what I'd be doing? Everything but gaming. Because Hawaii. Just sayin'.
 
I'm rather shocked at the number of people in this thread on a "Tech Forum" who clearly don't understand the difference between "speed" and "Latency" or for that matter how the size of a region can detrimentally impact some players purely on distance. Also the implication that just because someone lives somewhere that they shouldn't be able to choose what they enjoy is rather stupid.
 
I actually think it has a lot more to do with Spam (the meat) consumption than the actual latency difference.

Lay off the Hormel bros.
 
Pft... Pussies! Back in the mid 90s if I was getting under a 200 ping playing CTF Quake I was pumped. Typically it was in the 2580-350 range. But there was one server quake.golden.net where I could get ping times of 150 or less.
 
Pony up the cash? If you live on an Island you can probably afford to chip in a couple dollars for some fiber... That cable they laid from London to Tokyo only has 154ms latency on it, and that's literally halfway around the world.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/arctic-fibre-project-to-link-japan-and-uk


The only reason why latency is going up much from West Coast to Chicago is because the path between them has a lot of hops on it. As the crow files it's about ~4,200 miles total, or around 6,800km. So take the number above and cut it in half and you could probably get from Hawaii to Chicago in ~75ms with a direct connection.
 
this is probably one of my favorite threads yet!

Normally I tend to take the stance "dont bash someone because of your jealousy" but even I am not immune.

F them and their perfect weather and beaches with high pings, here we have to take supplements for lack of sun in ohio lol
 
Every game I play that I track on reddit has Australians and similar remote nation players that whine every day about their bad connections and how companies don't respect them enough to make local servers for them so they can have a decent ping too.

So one of these games recently opened an Australian server in response to these complaints. And the server population is so low they can't get any matches going. So this vocal minority cost the gaming company a bunch of money for no gain. Next time you see these people whine, tell them to shut the hell up, or they can make their own Australian gaming studio, with Australian servers. Their ability to whine far exceeds their actual market presence.
 
i loved it so much when a server i played on all the time had latency of 8ms going to 20-30ms server was annoying (not, but was noticeable) i got banned of there server twice for using my spidey sense (sound its like some people play without sound lol) and god like shots to the point even i thought i was cheating when i was one shotting them

good i knew the owner of the server and the owner was as good as me as when we was on opposite sides it was like the other 10 or so players on each side was just getting in the way so we could kill each other, if we was on same side was a little unfair for the other side and was more the race to 100 kills

wish they never changed the server they used as it was like it was inside my ISP network as never had any other game servers have pings lower than 15 before (after 12ms is norm outside my ISP network)
 
I like this thread. I live in Hawaii and I never once thought my pings were too high.

What is too high is the fucking shipping, seriously screw the shipping costs. Oh and the cell coverage, driving down the free way and I get cut off? Whaaat!? Yes I was the passenger.
 
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