internet latency & effects on hit registration

[Unixko]

what mello says makes sense in any case. I have the same assumption that it is a local overload of the networks.
i have been playing shooter since counterstrike 7.1 and that is a very long time. if i was watching someone ingame i could tell after 1 minute if this person has a good internet connection or not. especially with cs 1.6 you could see it clearly on recoil at m4/ak and on the hit registration.

I have played a few years little and since about 1 year again (call of duty/warzone) and i can do what i want but my hit registration is bad. I am seen by the opponent also earlier and it works very delayed but I often have the best ping on the server. I know for example where an opponent comes out and I am in the zoom of a weapon and I get hit before I can even pull the trigger. Since you play against console players on warzone you might think that this is not possible.

I have a 3000 Euro PC and everything perfectly adjusted on a 240 Hz display. perfect mouse sensitivity, a good mousepad, i can hear opponents well with a good headset and i have good reflexes. Everything is useless if my internet is broken.
The crazy thing is there is no sign except the ingame performance. Download/Upload speed is good, no disconnects and a ping 10-20 ms, sometimes 30 ms.

I have tried 3 different ISPs and it is the same everywhere. The ping differs a bit.

Pc and Xbox the same, modem and different routers.So I tested everything before the phone jack.
I proceeded logically and tried to exclude the things.

I have excluded the routing of the ISP by the ISP change or VPN. So I excluded the last way with the routing and the first way in the private area.
The problem can only be between my house or the overloaded line at the DSL outdoor slam or the distributor (where the DSL ports are and where all users are connected).
I have heard that in Germany 60-120 people are on one line. An ISP change didn't work for me because the line is always the same.

The network belongs to the Telekom and other ISPs rent this line from the Telekom. This does not change the fact that my line is a shared medium.

for me the last try is a cheap leased line, a direct connection to the backbone/data center of an ISP.
With this all preliminary steps are skipped and i have my own line. i have been waiting for a few weeks for the setup and will gladly report if there has been a change.

but the problem can only be here. I have contact in many german forums with other players who also try to eliminate this problem. One player plays fifa at his home and it is going very badly, if he plays fifa at his girlfriend's house online it is a completely different feeling. My friend lives 1 mile away from me and it has a different feel than playing at my house.
If it is the same ISP and in almost the same area, the routing will be the same.

It can't be because of the electricity. I have also ruled that out with an uninterruptible power supply.

you had perfect mouse sensitivity then your mouse is not floatly or delayed so then you have different problem

[mello]

what mello says makes sense in any case. I have the same assumption that it is a local overload of the networks.

It has been known to happen and be the cause for all problems related to online gaming for nearly 20 years.

i have been playing shooter since counterstrike 7.1 and that is a very long time. if i was watching someone ingame i could tell after 1 minute if this person has a good internet connection or not. especially with cs 1.6 you could see it clearly on recoil at m4/ak and on the hit registration.

And this is exactly what i did recently. Went back to CS 1.6 for a few months as it is an old engine, old & poor netcode with poor lag compensation & stuttering player models. All the inconsistencies are clearly visible & very easy to spot. New games have much better netcodes, better lag compensation and model movement smoothed out so the problems are partially hidden and harder to spot, but they do exist and they affect the gaming performance negatively to the exact same extent.

I have a 3000 Euro PC and everything perfectly adjusted on a 240 Hz display. perfect mouse sensitivity, a good mousepad, i can hear opponents well with a good headset and i have good reflexes. Everything is useless if my internet is broken.

100% correct. You can be literally the best player in the world with best PC & hardware in the world, but all of that will mean nothing if your internet is broken. And in comparison, average or above average player with poor PC & generic hardware can appear to be skilled & very good if his internet is perfect.

The crazy thing is there is no sign except the ingame performance. Download/Upload speed is good, no disconnects and a ping 10-20 ms, sometimes 30 ms.

Correct. That is why i said ping is completely irrelevant, same with dl/ul speeds of your connection. Literally none of this matters. You can have this problem even with ping 10 & on fibre 1Gb/s, same as i do. The only thing that matters is the proper performance, proper delivery & proper handling of UDP packets, particularly on an upstream channel.

I have tried 3 different ISPs and it is the same everywhere. The ping differs a bit. Pc and Xbox the same, modem and different routers. So I tested everything before the phone jack. I proceeded logically and tried to exclude the things.

I have excluded the routing of the ISP by the ISP change or VPN. So I excluded the last way with the routing and the first way in the private area. The problem can only be between my house or the overloaded line at the DSL outdoor slam or the distributor (where the DSL ports are and where all users are connected). I have heard that in Germany 60-120 people are on one line. An ISP change didn't work for me because the line is always the same. The network belongs to the Telekom and other ISPs rent this line from the Telekom. This does not change the fact that my line is a shared medium.

Again, 100% correct. If a smaller ISP is leasing the line from bigger ISP, you will still have all these problems.

For me the last try is a cheap leased line, a direct connection to the backbone/data center of an ISP. With this all preliminary steps are skipped and i have my own line. i have been waiting for a few weeks for the setup and will gladly report if there has been a change.

In the meantime try mobile ISP or basically use the internet from your smartphone with your PC. I can literally fix everything within 10-15 seconds by simply switching from my home wired fiber 1Gb/s connection to a wireless mobile connection.

It can't be because of the electricity. I have also ruled that out with an uninterruptible power supply.

Of course it can't be. Anyone, who actually properly analyses the problems that are occuring while understanding game dynamics and mechanics, knows that this problem can only be caused by internet connection. The issue is simply too consistent, too persistent and way too specific, so it can't be just a random occurance from something like electricity as it would cause completely different issues. It is obviously a deliberate action & side effect, a man-made artifact, caused by whatever ISP's are using to control the traffic conditions in their networks.

[dervu]

If someone wants proof, then cooperate with people who have this electricity issue. Let them come to you, if their PC works there and they still observe same issues as you with internet then it is all clear. Too bad we have this pandemic right now.

[oldschool007]

Many thanks to mello for your approval It feels good to know that somebody sees it that way and it shows me that I am right in the end. It took a lot of money to test it all and a lot of work on research, computer tuning, software tuning, TCP settings and a lot of nerves. It did not solve the problem but it took me a few steps further.

Where do you think this local overload takes place exactly? That there are too many users on the same line with too much traffic or too many users on the DSL outdoor slam (a grey box in front of the house) or too many on the DSL exchange? (Unfortunately I don't know the exact English translation. I mean the local place in a district where all DSL lines of the inhabitants come together. It is a building)

With my ISP I could never achieve anything. As long as the download and upload values are good and I have no dropouts or visible packet loss I could never get anything there. If I told them that online gaming was going badly they put it on the game servers or peering.

Where do you come from mello? Here in Germany the net is bad anyway. We are the industrial nation in europe par excellence but our internet/mobile network is crappy and outdated. Telekom used to be the state postal service and now they have a monopoly and own 98% of most lines. They slept through the fiber optic expansion and are still investing in VDSL vectoring or VDSL supervectoring with 100 or 250 mbit......
VDSL uses fiber to the DSL distributor and then copper cable from there to the private house. They also build fiber optic lines like FTTH but very slowly.

I tried your idea of playing over the mobile network but it went even worse than that. The ping was around 60 ms but the jitter was high. It felt worse than before. I also have to say that the antennas of the mobile network are connected to the same DSL outdoor slams (with fiber) as the internet over the phone line (I'm not 100% sure about that).Our cell phone network is the most expensive and worst in Europe and therefore I left the tests with it.

I am now waiting for my Leased Line with 4 mbit download/upload for 170 Euro monthly :/
In my theory it could be the (expensive) solution. Do you think it could help mello? Otherwise I wait a few more months until 5G is possible here and try it here again. Fortunately I can cancel such contracts within 14 days.

The leased line with 4 mbit should be enough for playing, 8 mbit costs over 250 euro and 500 mbit costs around 800-900 euro. If this works I would use the Leased Line for gaming and the 250 mbit vdsl connection for surfing, downloading, netflix, wlan or big game updates.But it's a pity that you have to go this way to be able to play online with a good quality. For the VDSL connection I already pay 65 Euro per month and that is 250 mbit download and 40 mbit upload.

Germany is just not the best for gamers. Maybe if you have enough money everything is possible but the private user has problems or it is a lottery.

I still remember the old counterstrike days where we always had really good teams (TAMM, mTw, mousesports, SK.de,) but the Scandinavians just had the much better internet.

it's like you said mello the internet connection of a player is the crucial parameter in this kind of formula. The hardware at home is somewhere in the success but only if the internet is good.

I know that in my home a player like Shroud would only be an average player. With my internet you have the feeling that you only play against pro gamers. I have a time window of 0 to react and players come around the corners almost shooting. When only 30% of the hits are registered by the server you can imagine how pointless playing is.

Looking at Shroud on youtube, warzone seems like a completely different game to him. He has time to react, it almost seems like his opponents are sleeping and he only needs a third of the shots I need.

[Conan]

So true, everything you said.
Germany is similar to Croatia in these terms.
Its bonkersly bad.
I am wondering what about Sky link? 5G?
is any of that viable? I have no internet future....
what is a leased line anyway?

[Unixko]

So true, everything you said.
Germany is similar to Croatia in these terms.
Its bonkersly bad.
I am wondering what about Sky link? 5G?
is any of that viable? I have no internet future....
what is a leased line anyway?

so many pro players from germany and even more on faceit you should try contact some of them

[diakou]

I'd advise the people who genuinely believe it to be your internet latency even when the numbers are "healthy" to be the reason for your lag to attempt Cloudflare's warp+ service (also known as the 1.1.1.1 faster internet app)

It essentially behaves to an extent like a "gaming VPN" as people call them (even though they are not designed for what VPN's are supposed to do, referring to haste or exitlag)

What it does is; first it obviously masks your data / encrypts it but after that, the warp+ function leverages their argo smart routing (which means using their "private" internet backbone/CDN) to route you forward. In times like these, such as during COVID congestion on the public internet peering routes, it is highly effective. This is a very simplified "explanation" If you're familiar with what Riot Direct, AWS Global Accelerator or Network Next does (TCP or Primarily UDP acceleration) this essentially is quite literally just that, except for consumers now. There's still a few bugs here and there to be dealt with, but I've seen my friend from Germany with a decent ISP (even though it seems like germany is terrible) have 24ms to Frankfurt servers, 20ms with Haste and 16ms with Warp+ (this does not account for millions of other variables like packetloss, specific route congestion problems or jitter, even if the jitter was also close to perfect) Myself have used it for two days since their recent beta program update that significantly improved connections. Outside of that another person from Portugal who has been impossibly dealing with COVID-19 induced lag, Haste, VPNs, his own line couldn't get past it, but warp+ did.

I will link as much relevant information as I can so you guys can read upon it and educate yourself and then if interested, experiment with it. There's a high chance cloudflare "accidentally" helped all gamers more than they could realize here.

The cost of cloudflare warp+ is modeled to be roughly the same price as a big mac locally (around $5 is the number here for most part) to get this to work however, it's a bit complicated as they do not support the purchase on desktop yet (but do support the warp+ function completely)
App store; 1.1.1.1 faster internet
1. You need to purchase it on your phone (it's free for just normal 1.1.1.1 warp, it's called "1.1.1.1 Faster Internet")
2. Once purchased, you go to settings (top right of the app) then find account
3. Copy / note the license key
4. Go to your PC, right click/click cloudflare warp, go to cogwheel in bottom right, press it, go to preferences.
5. Here, go to account, put in your license key here, cloudflare warp+ unlimited should activate now.
6. Go to bottom and press advanced - participate in beta program, this might not be necessary anymore, I'm not sure, on november 6th, there was an update that massively improved things which is needed. Go to general, search for updates, update it.
7. Now, just press the cloudflare warp app cogwheel again, 1.1.1.1 with warp. Then press the big button to connect.

Check ping-tests, traceroutes before/after for rough comparisons, test how it feels in gameplay etc. Keep in mind it's very recently made official and has been only tested for a year or so if I recall. There's still a lot of stuff to figure out, might not even help you, just a new solution possibility provided by one of the biggest players in the industry rather than smaller business companies for the consumer.

Link to site for download; https://1.1.1.1/

Blogposts; (first official public release for phone in 2019) https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-warp-plus/
Blogpost about Desktop release in October 2020 https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-for-desktop/

[nick4567]

Many thanks to mello for your approval It feels good to know that somebody sees it that way and it shows me that I am right in the end. It took a lot of money to test it all and a lot of work on research, computer tuning, software tuning, TCP settings and a lot of nerves. It did not solve the problem but it took me a few steps further.

Where do you think this local overload takes place exactly? That there are too many users on the same line with too much traffic or too many users on the DSL outdoor slam (a grey box in front of the house) or too many on the DSL exchange? (Unfortunately I don't know the exact English translation. I mean the local place in a district where all DSL lines of the inhabitants come together. It is a building)

With my ISP I could never achieve anything. As long as the download and upload values are good and I have no dropouts or visible packet loss I could never get anything there. If I told them that online gaming was going badly they put it on the game servers or peering.

Where do you come from mello? Here in Germany the net is bad anyway. We are the industrial nation in europe par excellence but our internet/mobile network is crappy and outdated. Telekom used to be the state postal service and now they have a monopoly and own 98% of most lines. They slept through the fiber optic expansion and are still investing in VDSL vectoring or VDSL supervectoring with 100 or 250 mbit......
VDSL uses fiber to the DSL distributor and then copper cable from there to the private house. They also build fiber optic lines like FTTH but very slowly.

I tried your idea of playing over the mobile network but it went even worse than that. The ping was around 60 ms but the jitter was high. It felt worse than before. I also have to say that the antennas of the mobile network are connected to the same DSL outdoor slams (with fiber) as the internet over the phone line (I'm not 100% sure about that).Our cell phone network is the most expensive and worst in Europe and therefore I left the tests with it.

I am now waiting for my Leased Line with 4 mbit download/upload for 170 Euro monthly :/
In my theory it could be the (expensive) solution. Do you think it could help mello? Otherwise I wait a few more months until 5G is possible here and try it here again. Fortunately I can cancel such contracts within 14 days.

The leased line with 4 mbit should be enough for playing, 8 mbit costs over 250 euro and 500 mbit costs around 800-900 euro. If this works I would use the Leased Line for gaming and the 250 mbit vdsl connection for surfing, downloading, netflix, wlan or big game updates.But it's a pity that you have to go this way to be able to play online with a good quality. For the VDSL connection I already pay 65 Euro per month and that is 250 mbit download and 40 mbit upload.

Germany is just not the best for gamers. Maybe if you have enough money everything is possible but the private user has problems or it is a lottery.

I still remember the old counterstrike days where we always had really good teams (TAMM, mTw, mousesports, SK.de,) but the Scandinavians just had the much better internet.

it's like you said mello the internet connection of a player is the crucial parameter in this kind of formula. The hardware at home is somewhere in the success but only if the internet is good.

I know that in my home a player like Shroud would only be an average player. With my internet you have the feeling that you only play against pro gamers. I have a time window of 0 to react and players come around the corners almost shooting. When only 30% of the hits are registered by the server you can imagine how pointless playing is.

Looking at Shroud on youtube, warzone seems like a completely different game to him. He has time to react, it almost seems like his opponents are sleeping and he only needs a third of the shots I need.

what is the time line for the leased line install did they give u an estimated date of completion

[DukeDice929]

I'd advise the people who genuinely believe it to be your internet latency even when the numbers are "healthy" to be the reason for your lag to attempt Cloudflare's warp+ service (also known as the 1.1.1.1 faster internet app)

No offence, but I think it's BS. One thing we're paying with our privacy to big corporation, another thing we're paying extra money. No, thanks!
Here is some data. Traceroute from my location to german server: https://ibb.co/jrxWPQv
Now the same traceroute, but with WARP enabled: https://ibb.co/ssjL90t
Objectively it's worse than regular ISP connection. Too much advertisement and such a failure. I see the only purpose of this "service" is for cheaters who want to hide their IP address.

[diakou]

I'd advise the people who genuinely believe it to be your internet latency even when the numbers are "healthy" to be the reason for your lag to attempt Cloudflare's warp+ service (also known as the 1.1.1.1 faster internet app)

No offence, but I think it's BS. One thing we're paying with our privacy to big corporation, another thing we're paying extra money. No, thanks!
Here is some data. Traceroute from my location to german server: https://ibb.co/jrxWPQv
Now the same traceroute, but with WARP enabled: https://ibb.co/ssjL90t
Objectively it's worse than regular ISP connection. Too much advertisement and such a failure. I see the only purpose of this "service" is for cheaters who want to hide their IP address.

I don't really think you completely understood - you're not getting the routing benefits without warp+, that's a premium feature leveraging their argo smart routing. I would not advise anyone to play with it without warp+ (even if it can help possibly)

Outside of that, no, it's not "BS" I mean it quite literally worked for two players during the Brawlhalla "World" Championship - European finals (including myself in the same event... but I got 17th heh) in-front of 100k viewers on twitch this very Sunday. Want to blame the possible server connection or peering routes utilized by the gameserver provider? Brawlhalla utilizes AWS' frankfurt servers for Europe. The game is a fighting game utilizing server-based rollback netcode which is very, very sensitive due to the server-based structure rather than peer to peer. Latency is incredibly crucial.

Player 1 during top 16 of the tournament;



Player 2 during entire tournament including a second place finish (yes you can easily look up who and what, I've already confirmed with the people to use them as complete anecdotal evidence in a high-profiled online event)




These players during the very same day used Exitlag, Haste, regular ISP internet and... cloudflare warp+ | only cloudflare warp+ was able to both deliver lower latency for them and avoid the COVID spike/load around 5-8PM CET on Sunday.

Regarding your WINMTR to the german servers; you highlighted "packet loss 0 sent receive" but in reality that is not packetloss. That is simply a node (router/server) that is limiting, down-prioritizing or outright ignoring ICMP packets. Meaning you will get no response thus the ridiculous 100% packetloss figure (sometimes that is not the case always however, but it is the case here)

If you'd like to in the future learn how to utilize traceroutes better for analysis, this presentation is relatively short and very good. Used by senior engineers over at i3d; https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nano ... 47_Sun.pdf
Another thing to consider is that consumer-available solutions like ICMP traceroutes and similar are very limited sadly, it is hard to overall diagnose how good a connection is based off these things alone, there's freak situations that can alter your gameplay. The most common thing however for ISPs and network troubleshooting is that the avg pings per hop do not matter to them (packetloss does) except for the very last hop. If the last hop is low, the between and before aspects do not matter as much (except for your last mile connections.)

Here is that same gameserver with a Norwegian regular ISP route by Telenor fiber connection vs Warp+

REGULAR ISP:


WARP+ same ISP:


See the stark difference / potential?
I'm not really sure whether or not you're using warp+ or just warp. But even in the case of warp+ not working ideally, that is simply the way of the internet. Cloudflare will improve their systems with time, one day it should work for everyone hopefully or there's another competitor or someone else who have a better solution. This is by no means any proper evidence or proof that it is undoubtedly good, it is however good enough anecdotal evidence to prove that it works.

Lastly, if you're worried about "giving away your data on a purchase", without sounding too rude, I'd recommend you to read the EULA's of every game you've purchased online, especially Ubisoft's

(this does not mean that your data is protected either way, I don't care what cloudflare says about your data or how they're protecting it, I have very little reason to trust claims like these ever. This is simply arguing for better routing technologies in competitive games, nothing more.)