A better game experience

[megatron219]

I've been playing this game for quite a while. So many games are ruined because of players' bad connections. We used to be able to see a player's ping in the lobby, but it wasn't the most useful tool for various reasons. However, I think we should reintroduce it with the following changes, to make gameplay better:

1. Most ping tests are useless to this game. They send a small packet of information to the target and measure return time. But the real issue is whether the target's (other player's) connection can *constantly* return data fast enough, like is required in a game. If a connection is saturated, it might pass a regular ping test, but still be horrible in-game. So I suggest a "ping stress test" in the game lobby. Have every player constantly send X amount of data to every other player (X being the average amount sent in a game - I don't know how much that is). Report on whether or not the target is consistently sending that data back quickly enough.

2. Have a rating system for connections. Let people rate whether someone disconnects, lags, etc. Have ratings fade out after a month or so, so people can fix their connections and not permanently have a negative rating. This will keep data on a player current, and allow other players know if a player has a bad connection.

[rambouillet]

Hear, hear

[BenDover]

If you look through this forum you'll see there have been proposals like this and all have been rejected because apparently FAF community is too stupid to draw any meaningful conclusions when presented with another player's ping therefore we should all play in lag.

[keyser]

ping appear when it reach a number that is too high iirc

[BenDover]

ping appear when it reach a number that is too high iirc

Which is dumb and confusing because 50% of people think CPU/ping tab shows a mixture of CPU and ping rating the other half just thinks the ping is broken and auto kicks all Australians. GJ

[megatron219]

ping appear when it reach a number that is too high iirc

This type of ping test isn't sufficient. It's easy to have a bad connection but still past a ping test. It needs to be a ping stress test - showing how well the connection handles the amount of data that's sent in-game.

[PhilipJFry]

FA doesn't send a lot of data during the game
the cpu and ping bar will be split next patch to avoid people confusing the cpu value for the ping
the reason why pings are not shown as long as they don't spike over 500 ms is because people think this game needs 100 ms pings to run smooth and kick people when seeing stuff like 300 ms ping

[BenDover]

And yet lags happen even though the ping bar never appears. How come? Could it be because your reasoning is useless and all pings matter not just between you and other players but between all players in the game? It's not like the game can lag only for the 2 people having problems.
This idea of removing the ping bar would be excellent in the perfect world with dedicated servers, with P2P it's just annoying and forces oh so many rehosts.

Also seeing sb's ping would prevent the situations like when a player from Europe joins my game full of Australians and everything's peachy except when I start the game turns out he has 300 ping to me so let us all imagine how bad the ping is to the aussies. Situation easily prevented with stock lobby, impossible to solve without a rehost now. Glorious.
If you don't understand this I don't think you should be making these changes

[Gorton]

And yet lags happen even though the ping bar never appears. How come? Could it be because your reasoning is useless and all pings matter not just between you and other players but between all players in the game? It's not like the game can lag only for the 2 people having problems.
This idea of removing the ping bar would be excellent in the perfect world with dedicated servers, with P2P it's just annoying and forces oh so many rehosts.

Also seeing sb's ping would prevent the situations like when a player from Europe joins my game full of Australians and everything's peachy except when I start the game turns out he has 300 ping to me so let us all imagine how bad the ping is to the aussies. Situation easily prevented with stock lobby, impossible to solve without a rehost now. Glorious.
If you don't understand this I don't think you should be making these changes

...
I really don't think you understand what is going on
the bar isn't being removed
in the case where a person has a bad connection with another you already can't see it so it would make no difference, they have to see it for themselves anyway (it'd be lovely if this was implemented so the host can check these things but this is a completely different topic).

And related is that large ping isn't the sole cause of lag as you must know, unstable ping is a bigger problem...

[BenDover]

...
I really don't think you understand what is going on
the bar isn't being removed
in the case where a person has a bad connection with another you already can't see it so it would make no difference, they have to see it for themselves anyway (it'd be lovely if this was implemented so the host can check these things but this is a completely different topic).

And related is that large ping isn't the sole cause of lag as you must know, unstable ping is a bigger problem...

Seeing a stupid bar indeed would make no difference, seeing a number however and having knowledge of relative position of countries in question would give me a chance to make an educated guess, a damn good one I assure you.