Dear EA,
For the sake of constructive feedback and ongoing improvement of your product I am writing you this open letter with a few observations and suggestions so that it may be forwarded to the DICE development team at your discretion.
Currently I am in the second month of playing this game and on a regular basis I am experiencing extreme forms of lag. I think I have done pretty much everything under the sun that can be done to have an optimal connection. Obviously it could be that I have missed something that is causing my connection to be sub optimal. By all means feel free to make suggestions on how to improve my connectivity/gaming experience.
My connectivity / Geographical location / The things I've done so far
- Living roughly 600 miles from the European data center, yields me a 24ms connection with minimal jitter (0-1ms)
- The Fiber to the Home connection that is used to connect to the Internet has adequate bandwidth, 100Mbps down- and upstream
- Shielded twisted pair CAT-5e cabling is used in my network environment
- The console has QoS priority for any traffic in case of congestion
- There are no firewall restrictions in place, all required ports are available
- Recently the console has been fully re-initialized my console. Ran diagnostics on the built-in HDD on a PC, to rule out any IO issues and/or other drive problems. Re-installed Battlefield 4 after no such problems were detected
- The Battlelog game browser is used to find optimal latency servers
- No quick matching is used, so accidental region tourism is no longer possible
Obviously it could be that I have missed something that is causing my connection to be sub optimal. By all means feel free to make suggestions on how to improve my connectivity/gaming experience. Obviously I nor you have have no control of the connectivity of every single of your customers however I have drafted a shortlist of suggestions that may alleviate some of the problems encountered without having to code your way out of real world connectivity issues.
- The addition of latency restricting rental and/or public EA servers
- A warning message when people use the Quick Matching feature when they are being zoned outside their own region
- A warning message for WiFi users to inform them they may have varying results based on their choice of connectivity
- Allocating more resources to the public servers, they seem to be under a lot of duress at times (especially during double XP events)
Personally I firmly believe the net code is doing a great job considering the latency deviation it has to deal with. However if it still doesn't give the desired results after implementing some restrictions it would be appreciated if you could focus again on
- Increasing the tick rate of the game instead of heavily relying on advanced input prediction, lag compensation and simulation on the client side
- Fixing hit detection scripting, hit boxes do not seem to spawn simultaneously with models (Eg. Test range, while this could be a map scripting issue, it is food for thought being local and all)
Kind regards,
A concerned customer
PS. Is the game designed to work on a global level without any latency restrictions? The (in)game browser seems to indicate this is indeed the case, since we can freely choose regions and the Quick Matching moves us across regions if need be. Anyway, if so (being in complete awe if your solution is supposed to mitigate the latency on a global scale), can you please confirm this.
