2013-12-17 13:08

While that would improve things, it would not be unfortunately a sufficient solution. The numeric depiction of latency would help, but still you can approximately know what a full bar means simply by accesing battlelog. For dice, a full bar means a ping of 120ms or less, just check your server list on battlelog and you'll see what I mean. The reason this works, and works pretty well actually, on PC is that servers can be rented in your country most of the times. So f.e. a Greek guy could rent a server located in Greece, as swedish guy in Sweden etc. This way you could say that by not allowing players with a ping value of lets say more than 80 to join, you could keep things local and therefore deminish latency related issues. On console on the other hand, when renting a server you have no control whatsoever on picking the host of said server, or its location for that matter. If the model of BF3 is carried over to BF4 then all servers in Europe would be located Germany or Italy, without you beeing able to choose which one. So it could very well be that in order for a server to not have lag issues, the owner would have to say that you can only play if you have a ping greater that f.e. 50 and smaller thatn f.e. 100, because it could very well be that a Portuguese owner would have a bigger latency on his own server than the German guy visiting.

A more viable solution could be to increase server tickrate, which is obviously not going to happen, since it would both cost them more money and at the same time require a greater bandwith from all players (because BF is not a hitscan game), so it would create financial loss for them either by elevating cost, or by making the consumer base smaller because of higher it connection specs one would need to play the game online. Though I wish they would do it, they are not going to.

So the only thing left really is to change the priority of information sent to clients by the server on present tickrate. If all priority is given to to bullet/projectile information and visual elements, then the game will run much much smoother (especially on cq large maps where there is a lot of dynamicly changing info), but it would happen at the cost of sound info. So while gunplay would be smoother, you would get the "no sound bug" from time to time. To further proove this point, remember that hitreg etc on BF3 was at its best comparatitevely (it was never perfect obviously), when we had the no sound bug.

Of course it is kind of stupid on one hand to "accept" these problems, because DICE cant fix them all, but if we want to be realists that's all that can be done. Or not playing the game if it is unbearable (for me it isn't).



@SinlessViper: please read and at least try to understand before bitching. US is not the acromyn for United States, he isn't even American lol, but for the word us, as in us gamers/players, simply written in caps to emphasize.