Gamers in Hawaii Can't Compete Because of Latency

Do they not have a fiber connection to the mainland? I'm with the rest of you though, I used to get between 160 - 600 ping in Doom, Quake, etc up until 2001 (no broadband available at my old house until 2016).
 
auntjemima said:
I spent all of my childhood playing Quake with a 300 ping. Suck it up.
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Getting into games with a ping in the lower 200s was pure bliss. My mind was blown when I worked 72 kbps out of my 56k modem and ISP, and my ping dropped to the lower 100s in Counter-Strike. Of course these days we're back to 200-300ms pings and 20 Hz ticrates with P2P...
 
otherweeb said:
Plenty of games have servers in places other than Chicago and Dallas. Maybe League of Legends needs to get with the times?
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Does anyone know why those two cities are the hubs for gaming servers? I know Atlanta is another from my server admin days, but I always found it puzzling that a handful of locations account for 99% of all available gaming servers.
 
gamerk2 said:
Does anyone know why those two cities are the hubs for gaming servers? I know Atlanta is another from my server admin days, but I always found it puzzling that a handful of locations account for 99% of all available gaming servers.
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It's a central location in the middle of the US, i.e. the least hops and distance from any point in the US. With Texas, it is a huge central point for fiber with a lot of money dumped laying fiber in Texas a long time ago (sometimes catastrophically).
 
While I do agree we need some more lines to Hawaii and Alaska (i assume some of the latency is due to saturation of the existing bandwidth), I think this problem is ultimately a non-starter...welcome to life....move....besides you guys have bigger problems. Like your Nazi gun laws.
 
Shadohh said:
While I do agree we need some more lines to Hawaii and Alaska (i assume some of the latency is due to saturation of the existing bandwidth), I think this problem is ultimately a non-starter...welcome to life....move....besides you guys have bigger problems. Like your Nazi gun laws.
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It has nothing to do with saturation. There is shit tons of bandwidth as Hawaii has serious pipes coming from Asia to the US through it.

It's an issue of distance. You aren't going faster then the speed of light.
 
Mchart said:
It has nothing to do with saturation. There is shit tons of bandwidth as Hawaii has serious pipes coming from Asia to the US through it.

It's an issue of distance. You aren't going faster then the speed of light.
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Sucks to be them then, now lets gets some serious guns from asia to the US through hawaii :D :D :D
 
This whole story is hilarious to me.

Gamers, especially 'casual' ones, but also those who are more invested and interested, have a bad misconception of how 'lag' is defined.

I complain about lag a lot, it's the only enemy I can't beat in a fair game and wading through the salty-shade, always brings me a never ending stream of facepalms, because of how many people just don't seem to understand that ping by itself IS NOT lag.
It's a measurement of round-trip travel time between two points, but depending on a ton of other factors, it cannot be used as the only metric for whether there's lag in a game, server or player.

You can have a low ping and still experience lag, they are not mutually exclusive, yet a lot of people seem to think they are or it's a one-sided equation.
Regardless of ping, a player can suffer hit registration issues, other players teleporting/warping, or input lag (In online games, this term can apply and be caused by poorly optimized netcode) ...and the best part - it can all vary and change during game!


hurleybird said:
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.
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So much this.
In Evolve Stage 2 a game I'm quite fond of and a peer-peer based game, the Monster player going up against 4 Hunter players, is the most affected when lag reaches out it's deplorable hand.
And there's little you can do about it, especially against competent players!
But those who are constantly in a laggy environment, are most likely and best suited to learn to adapt to and ultimately not feel the effects as much.


lilbabycat said:
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
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They sure can!
That benefit is referred to as netcode for gaming context.
It's up to the developer to implement how netcode affects all clients; low/high ping, close/far location, etc.
If they have poorly optimized netcode (or none at all) those with low pings typically fare better - but that only holds true if there's no holding/delaying of data to all clients.
This was the case most notably back in Quake days, where it was normal for high ping players to leave a game because there was no point in trying.

If they implement decent netcode, the goal is typically to ensure all clients receive updates at the same time, giving all players a fair game and ability to re-act accordingly.
But, this has the opposite effect on low-ping players.
Avatars are more likely to teleport/warp on screen, but there are a lot of other very minor, yet possibly very game changing results that vary by game.


Dekoth-E- said:
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.
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gg lag! - My favorite saying in online games.
Never gets old to have ignorant people responding.

It's a taboo subject for most - you can never complain about lag, otherwise you're just making an excuse or being salty for why you lost.
Everyone knows there's a problem, but would rather not discuss it.
Even learned people base opinions on myths.
It's also hard to apply on a game by game basis, since developers implement their own rules for netcode and there's no standard process (of which I'm aware).

I'm definitely in the 'if you live on Mars, you should not be playing video games' group, however I also feel developers should also give gamers choices when it comes to trying to connect with other players in terms of distance and pings.
Like for Evolve, I want an option to play ONLY other NA gamers.
Or those with a ping <100.
And to have the option to not ever be paired with x, y and z gamers because the lag with them is just unplayable.

It's a fine balance to be found from the developer's perspective, but it's an important one because lag issues can really ruin an otherwise great game.
 
sboucher said:
They live in fucking Hawaii.. Go surfing or something,

They'll get no sympathy from me.. :LOL:
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IIRC the only nice part of Hawaii are the toursit areas, the rest of the island chain is full of racist meth heads.
 
Of course players are looking for something to blame other than their skills.

reminds of the Honda ricers, and why they lost a race "I missed 3rd gear" or enter various other excuse here. If you are complaining about the ping, then play LAN only tournaments. Or just admit you suck and are striving to get better.
 
ebduncan said:
Of course players are looking for something to blame other than their skills.

reminds of the Honda ricers, and why they lost a race "I missed 3rd gear" or enter various other excuse here. If you are complaining about the ping, then play LAN only tournaments. Or just admit you suck and are striving to get better.
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"But he has a v8 and I only have a 4 cylinder"

Wah wah wah.
 
RogueTadhg said:
Obiviously, never played any game with a 33k modem. Remember when you got that first 56k Modem? Oh man. Blazing fast speeds. Until someone made a phonecall...
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Damn I went through 2400Baud to 19.2k to 33k then the holy grail of 56k. So glad I don't have to buy new modems every 18 months as standards changed. I laughed when I was watching Halt & Catch Fire the other day when they mentioned the network that was to be the Internet was "56k ready"...in 1986. Still a great show, even though they play fast and loose with certain tech time frames.
 
I remember when 14.4 was all the rage and then 33.6 and then 56K.....my first modem was 300 BAUD....
 
kreno said:
Do they not have a fiber connection to the mainland? I'm with the rest of you though, I used to get between 160 - 600 ping in Doom, Quake, etc up until 2001 (no broadband available at my old house until 2016).
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Direct distance from Honolulu to Chicago is 6840km, or 6 840 000 meters. Speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s. That means it takes 22.81 miliseconds for a bit to travel in one direction. 45.62 there and back - just for the "pipe" itself. And that was best case scenario. Real distance is probably bigger, there is also latency from various network devices on the route... 100ms+ ping doesn't sound unreasonable.
 
faugusztin said:
Direct distance from Honolulu to Chicago is 6840km, or 6 840 000 meters. Speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s. That means it takes 22.81 miliseconds for a bit to travel in one direction. 45.62 there and back - just for the "pipe" itself. And that was best case scenario. Real distance is probably bigger, there is also latency from various network devices on the route... 100ms+ ping doesn't sound unreasonable.
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Man, 6840km sounds like 100ms on a good day. On the other hand, a lot of that distance is likely nothing but transport.
 
faugusztin said:
Direct distance from Honolulu to Chicago is 6840km, or 6 840 000 meters. Speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s. That means it takes 22.81 miliseconds for a bit to travel in one direction. 45.62 there and back - just for the "pipe" itself. And that was best case scenario. Real distance is probably bigger, there is also latency from various network devices on the route... 100ms+ ping doesn't sound unreasonable.
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Your velocity is the speed of light in a vacuum. Real world speed in a fiber optic cable is about 30% lower. Your path is probably anything but direct between the two points as well.
 
dgz said:
Man, 6840km sounds like 100ms on a good day. On the other hand, a lot of that distance is likely nothing but transport.
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I covered this already a few posts up. If you base the latency off the article fibre project that is already implemented, you should be able to get a latency of ~75ms. They were able to achieve 154ms latency on a 15.6k run. But that would be if they ponied up the cash for a direct run to Chicago. (They were right around 1ms per 100Km, so 75ms is actually good for 7,500km, which would give you an additional 700km to use for elevation and routing changes)

The real reason why it's so much higher is because of the routing and congestion. There are so many variables once your connection comes on shore that it makes it difficult to have a steady latency. You're completely right that 100ms would probably be about the best case scenario right now, if you ran a test around 1am PST, you might be able to achieve that now. But once congestion occurs, it's not like your packets are getting priority so it could be all over the place and I could easily see where that turns into 150ms average, with peaks as high as 250ms.

Over time they probably will see the latency go down even more, as more and more long haul connections are made. I recall a time where even Chicago to Dallas was a substantial distance, and that was difficult to play.

Just found this while I was looking for Chicago to Dallas. 45ms but there seems to be a lot of jitter for their tests.
https://wondernetwork.com/pings/Chicago/Dallas

More interesting to this thread is this:
https://wondernetwork.com/pings/Chicago/Honolulu

Apparently they are in fact already getting right around 100ms average, and it's actually not quite as bad as I thought. But it's hard to say what network they are testing from and going to, so that likely makes the difference.

This should keep people entertained for a couple hours:

https://wondernetwork.com/pings


EDIT: I played around with that site for a bit, and the problem definitely seems to be the links between Chicago and other hubs. If you do a bit of math you can see that the majority of connections for them end up being < 50KM / ms, yet Honolulu can achieve 72 KM / ms to Denver, and 80 KM / ms to Phoenix. The latency between Honolulu and a peering point in the US is only slightly more than the connection between that peering point and Chicago. There is actually a column for that information as a percentage of I'm guessing the theoretical max. If you sort by %of SOL that should give you a pretty good idea of how fast that connection is actually moving data versus how fast it can. Chicago to Lyon, France is very fast at 93%. Chicago to Honolulu it's only hitting 67%. Honolulu to LA is 84%.
 
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