dervu wrote: ↑12 Aug 2020, 07:00
Remember that playing passive with high ping in any online FPS game will often end like getting prefired. If lower pinger will peek you he will probably have more time to react than you. If you will peek with high ping it can be reversed. That is why many people play aggresively.
I remember playing CS 1.5 on LAN and noone could touch me. Good old times.
Now playing with 10 ping and it is impossible to kill 90 pingers when they are aggressive and are any decent in game while I am holding angle.
Playing on 40 ping against 200 pinger in a game with client side detection? Impossible when he is aggressive, except when I go in flow state and do 130ms shot having perfect crosshair placement and being aggressive too.
This is a game-specific behaviour.
Currently, I don't play Valorant -- however, IIRC from what I think I heard, Valorant is more aggressive in handicapping ultralow-lag connections than CS:GO is. I may be wrong, but that might explain things partially --
Whether it's a fair playing-fiend-balancing algorithm, I cannot say, but the fact is that different latencies are handicapped differently to try to level the playing field. Metaphorically, the levelness / un-levelness of the playing field will vary from game to game -- unfortunately.
Some games have lag-compesnation algorithms that has an effect of penalizing LAN-quality connections (FTTH) when matched against online gamers. Not all games punishes fast connections (handicaps for fast connections) but if this happens, connecting to farther-away servers (add more lag) can sometimes help. In a perfect world, the latency handicap effect equalizes the playing field for all players (to a certain point), but it is extremely difficult to make it fair, given the multilple subtle elements of latency (bufferbloat behaviours, latency jitter behaviours, etc).
Testing is very sparse on latency emulators (e.g. Linktropy Mini, etc) or modified firmwares (DD-WRT that adds latency) is extremely skimpy at the moment, but I suspect theoretically can allow an FTTH user to optimize to a network latency (near-zero jitter but higher latency such as 30ms instead of 10ms) to play more balanced with others. Remarkably adding lag can improve competitive playability because of the lowlag-handicapping algorithms.
There are artificial network latency simulators (in a hardware device such as a
Linktropy or
WanRaptor or software package such as
WANem or "
WAN Latency Emulator"). Also, with the right software, a Linux box can also be set up as a network switch that intentionally adds latency, put between your game computer and your Internet connection. In theory, for an FTTH user, an ultralow-jitter precise-latency connection (i.e. a target such as 32ms +/- 1ms) might hit a theoretical sweet spot with certain online games. Such things can handicap lag in one or both directions, to simulate a longer wire. I have no idea if all this is construed as "cheating" to get around a low-lag handicapper algorithm in some online competitive games, so do your homework if you decide to experiment with adding artifical network latency.
Intentionally adding network lag is usually counterintuitive stuff, due to the mantra of "lower lag, lower lag!" but certain games does seem to arbitrarily over-handicap low network lag. Unfortuantely network-lag playing-field-levelling algorithms is a pretty complex topic that sometimes fails to be fair to all connections of all network latency behaviours.
You can continue to keep your subsystem lag very low (high performing computer/display), as the game can't lag-handicap for display lag (software can never know what the display lag is).
But network lag is something self-measurable by games themselves, and they do sometimes handicap ultrafast connections especially when other players are on slower connections. And this varies a lot from game to game. While Blur Busters doesn't specialize in network latency, Battle(non)sense YouTube covers all of this sheninigians, and it's interesting stuff.
This may or may not be a factor in the OP stuff, but it is a consideration to think about.