The rise of LPB’s, the decline of TF? Will an increase in low ping players mean the death of Team Fortress?
— Dock
My experience:
Before I start with this article I'd like to say I have been on a dial-up Internet connection for my
entire Internet experience. Starting with a 2400bps connection (That's .2k/s folks), I have not managed
to go far beyond 26400bps. 28000bps is a stretch for the place I live because of the extreme distance
between me and my telephone company’s central switching office. I have been playing TF for a long time.
Probably pushing 3 years or more now. I've seen it all when it comes to playing Quake online, be it
QuakeWorld or Quake2. During the New Years holiday many moons ago, I took a trip out of state to meet
some of my clan mates (from clan OSKI) and had the pleasure of experiencing what a broadband connection
can do.
I spent a little over a week playing around on with a 50ms connection to most of the West Coast servers.
While it amounted to little more than a drive-by encounter comparing it to the time I've spent on
dial-up, it showed me something I never truly grasped up until this point in time. I never comprehended
how much of a difference being a LPB (Low Ping Bastard) really has on the game.
Now there is something you have to take into account when you try to picture this experience I had.
I use to consider myself one of the best (top 20, top 10, take your pick because it doesn't really
matter anymore) HPB snipers of my time. When I took my first shot as a LPB sniper, it was a kill. I was
extremely startled and instantly ran off the loft (2fort5) and back into my own supply room to figure
out what had just happened. I was overwhelmed and I thought something had broken, because I was still in
a HBP frame of mind and I expected a HPB reaction to the controls.
When I fired that shot, I could swear up and down the wall that the person I had shot died BEFORE I had
let go of the fire button. What I had just realized was that this was not the case. Everything had
worked correctly and the person I had killed died after I had let go of the fire button. The thing is
I use to it taking up to half a second or more for the shot to register after I released the fire
button. So when the shot came almost instantly, in my mind it happened before I even let go.
It took me almost a week to shake this feeling off. Now if I had really tried hard enough, I could
usually take a place on a server between fourth to first place at will. But on this broadband
connection, I could take first place without even breaking a sweat. I dominated no-name public servers
without any effort AT ALL. It was one of the greatest experiences I have ever had in online gaming. And
let me tell you, going back to a dial-up connection was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And I
am not talking about having a decision to make about going from one place to another and giving up a
connection. I am talking about having to come back to reality. I got home and was dominated in every
game I played on my modem for a good two months straight. In just one week, I had become completely
dependent on the low latency to make my kills for me and I don't think even to this day that I have
recovered.
When bullets collide:
When ever I see a HPB complaining on a server about a LPB, the majority response I have seen to-date
has been the LPB calling the HPB a whiner. Lets take a look at the technical aspects of what makes a LPB
a LPB.
When you click a button on your mouse, the game interprets a command bound to that button and
sends a packet of data from your computer over the internet to the server containing information about
what that button is supposed to do. The time it takes to get from your computer to the server and back
is measured in milliseconds. A HPB is usually somewhere around 200ms and above, very often reaching as
high as 450. A LPB is 150ms or lower, although some would argue 90ms or below. It is possible and I have
personally seen people playing on servers with a round-trip latency as low as 12ms. Pings this low
usually means the persons computer is on a LAN (Local Area Network) with the server.
Round 1: FIGHT!
The difference between a latency of 130 and 180-200 is very large and can be felt easily. But it only
takes a difference of 1ms to unbalance things. Of course a separation of 1ms is impossible for a human
to notice, but a human is not the Quake client and is not the Quake server, and they both know the
separation exists and determines what happens in the game based on this. To better illustrate this I
give this example:
Two people are on a server both playing the same class, Sniper. These two players stand facing each
other, unmoving. One player has a ping of 52ms, the other has a ping of 289ms. Now lets say both
snipers fire at EXACTLY the same instant in time. Right now, player 2 with the ping of 289ms is dead.
How can this be you say when they fired at the same time? Because while it took player 1's packet only
52ms to reach the server and return to the player, it took player 2's packet 289ms to make the trip. At
the exact instant player 1's packet reaches the server, player 2's packet is still in transit and will
not reach the server for another 233ms.
When that packet reaches the server, player 2 is already dead.
>Round 2: FIGHT!
Let’s lay out another scenario. Player 1 has a ping of 52ms, Player 2 has a ping of 289ms. Player 2
fires, then Player 1 fires exactly 52ms after Player 2 has fired. It is reasonable to think that Player
1 is about to be in a world of shit, but it is not to be. If Player 1 fires 52ms after Player 2, Player
2's packet still has another 92.5ms before it even reaches the server. By the time the packet from
Player 1 reaches the server, (78 ms after Player 2 fired) the packet from Player 2 is still 66.5ms away.
Player 2 has again lost his life, even though he fired first. It is not a good day to be a HPB.
Fire when ready:
If you don't think that LPB’s have an unfair advantage, let me try a bit of reasoning with you and if
you still don't agree, you might as well stop here. First, let’s define being a LPB has having an
advantage over the average player. Let’s define unfair advantage. Obviously that would be a advantage
that you and only you, or in the case, only a select few have and can't be equaled by the average
player through dedicated, skill, or hard work. Good, now we have identified the problem. Being a LPB
is not fair to the average player. Now how to fix it.
Technical solutions become technical flaws.
This may get a little technical at first so bear with me. An idea I had while playing a few days ago
was how could you fix that sniper-shoot-sniper at the same time problem. The first thing that popped
into my mind was a way of determining when the shot was fired, and basing the kill on that rather than
basing it on which packet hit the server first. In theory, you time stamp the packet. When your game
client connects to the server, a timer is started. All timers on each client are synced by the server
every couple of minutes. Since time stamping a packet is going to increase its size having all packets
stamped is not practical or necessary. It should work reasonably well to just stamp the packets that
have to do with combat. Ok, now we have a workable system. Let's test it.
Round 3: FIGHT!
Sniper 1 has 52ms ping, Sniper 2 has 298ms ping. Sniper 2 fires, then 52ms later Sniper 1 fires. Sniper
1's packet reaches the server and the TS (Time Stamp) is recorded and Sniper 2 dies. Shortly (and I do
mean shortly) thereafter, Sniper 2's packet arrives with an earlier TS than Sniper 1. But Sniper 2 is
already dead, what do we do? Resurrect Sniper 2 and kill Sniper 1.
This is very ugly in game. Even though all this occurred in less than half a second, in half a second,
you die, come back, and then the other guy dies. Now the LPB is going to be really pissed off. But we
have a problem. What happens if the LPB kills someone else before your 'kill' packet arrives at the
server? You die, he kills someone else, then you come back and he dies, what happens to that poor third
soul? Since technically you fired first, you shouldn't have died in the first place and Sniper 2 should
have technically never lived to kill the third person. A paradox? You decide. It's irrelevant because
no matter how smart you are, you can't beat ping.
There are some creative and simple methods of dealing with ping after the fact. You can handicap LPB's
by limiting the mount of damage they do to HPB's. You can in turn raise the damage a HBP does to LPB's.
For some reason this idea has never caught on and I to this day have yet to understand why. There are
no technical issues now. Before with Quake-C coding it was impossible to access the data to discover
the players pings. But in almost all games since Quake2, this has been possible. Are the LPB's scared
that they will actually have to have some skill now? Or does anyone really care. You decide.
Dying slowly is the worst, because you never really see it coming.
I've heard a lot of excuses for why TF is "Dying" or is "Dead". I'd like to end this by trying to
convince people that TF is not dead. Better than 1,000 people play TF1 every weekend. If you don't
believe me, refresh all the TF1 servers in your favorite game browser and add up all the people playing.
And TFC is a lot different than TF1, but it is still the same game and should be counted towards the
life and longevity of TF1.
I do agree that TF1 has slowly declined for a while now. When I stopped to find the reason for it, it
hit me like a brick. What has changed about TF1 since the old school days? Maps? Not really. Game play?
2.5 is pretty old, and it's not really all that different than 2.1 in most respects. Is it the number
of clans? There are new TF clans forming every single day. Is it the amount of people playing? We
already covered that base. No, we have to look in the less obvious places. What little factor about
the players has slowly changed in 1 direction ever since the inception of TF?
The Internet connections of the players have changed. You can't argue that there are a lot more LPB's
than there use to be. Every day I see people I know coming online with new broadband connections,
usually a cable modem or a xDSL line. Slowly but surely, the number of LPB's has been building over
the years starting from virtually none, usually college students, to nearly a third or half of the
players today. And if not today, tomorrow. Connection speed and the amount of people with them have
been the only factor in the equation that has been changing all this time. When you start out with a
community of dial-up users, and start throwing in some LPB's on ISDN/T-3's/T-1's you get a little
resentment because you just can't beat that. And if you can, it's very hard and stressful and takes its
toll on you.
Two years later you start throwing in ALOT of cable users and the mix goes to 2:1 for dial-up to
broadband. Today, in the third year you get that ratio up to nearly 2:1.5. Or even 1.2:1 and you get a
lot of LPB's that aren't having any fun because it's no challenge to kill someone with a 300 ping, and a
lot of pissed off HPB's because everywhere they turn there is a LPB slaughtering him/her.
I am not trying to lay blame for the downward spiral of TF on LPB's. Laying blame on someone usually
means they did something wrong. People with broadband connections have not done anything wrong. It's
just the way things are. I think LPB's are the reason TF has declined so much lately, but that is my
sole opinion. I am entitled to it, as you are to your own. Consider carefully the things I've said, and
draw your own conclusions.
In the end, I'm not sure what difference this article will make, if any. I find TF1 still very
satisfying, but only with my peers. I don't enjoy playing against or with LPB's because they can do
things that I can't by virtue of luck or design. They are lucky enough to live within 3 miles of their
telco's central switching office, they are lucky enough to have cable that offers cable modems. Or they
wanted it bad enough that they moved to a area where one of these services was available, or they wanted
it bad enough they were willing to spend the money to pay for the still expensive ISDN, or even T-1.
If you are one of those lucky enough to live in a place where broadband is available, I ask of you and
your friends to remember what it was like what you were on a modem. Have some consideration for people
who don't have access to things you do. Don't jump on a server with a few or no LPB's at all and Snipe
the shit out of the defenseless modem players. It's all about having fun. You can be beaten and still
have had fun, but being slaughtered with no chance at all makes it a bad game for everyone. It was no
fun for you because it was no challenge, it was no fun for the guys you killed because they never had a
chance.
Stay cool my friends, and maybe I'll see you in TF2.
Think the author was right on target or completely off the deep end? Let us know -- mail us or post in the forums!
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