EA Lag Compensation Deep Dive

[doubleome]

I remember playing bf3 with our US clanmates on US servers ~130 ping was litterly godmode.

True there cant be a perfect system and something has got to give but my god it’s a terrible experience right noe

[CountSero]

@DeepSixxxx thnx for the summary

but i think it should be mentioned that battlefield has also two different zones with different tick rates depending how far the enemy is away from you. This adds also up into the latency delay (because of the different refresh rate of information).

Also, when you playing the game on PC and your FPS is lower than the tick rate (I think 45Hz is the one for BF2042) the system gets F* Up also.

I hope that nobody plays the games below 60fps but we all now how demanding BF2042 related to the hardware (so it is possible that there are some players which play below 45 fps)


Also, what is the tick rate of Apex? 20-25? (Because I think that apex feels ok for such a tick rate)

But at the same time you never will have 100 player at one screen at the same time in Apex.

[CyberDyme]

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@OskooI_007 wrote:

I disagree with the statement saying if LOW and HIGH come around a corner at the same time, LOW will see HIGH first. From my experience it's the opposite, HIGH will see LOW first.

Lag compensation favors high ping players in the vast majority of situations. This is due to time syncronization which allows high ping players to time travel further into the future than low ping players.

Essentially this means the server allows HIGH to render more ticks into the future, allowing HIGH to guess what the future might look like. HIGH is essentially shooting LOW from the future.

Time synchronization is the main mechanic behind lag compensation.

https://timonpost.medium.com/game-networking-9-bonus-overwatch-model-4faba078cf05

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Exactly right @OskooI_007 !

Lag Compensation is exactly that.  Compensating the lag for the players that have a HIGH latency, so they still can play in an environment with LOW latency players.  And it is all the other enemy players with LOWer latency that pays the price for it!   Exactly because the lag compensation is artificially placing the HIGH latency players onto the screen of the LOW latency players, all without absolute certainty that they actually are indeed at that location.  Result is that the LOW latency players are shooting at a fata morgana of the HIGH latency players, while they in reality may be somewhere else.

While the opposite is not the case to the same degree for the HIGH latency players, as the LOW latency player locations will always be more true to reality of the physical gameplay of the players.  LOW latency players have a low latency before their true location is confirmed and hence where they are shown to be by server to other players in the game is closer to the true position when the lag compensation/game mechanic calculus have been completed and damage/kills are being determined.

EA tech team is trying to make it sound sweet and good, but fact is that HIGH latency players are making the gaming experience poor for the LOW latency players.  And EA knows this very well, reason why we have not had any player PING score now in the last many games, as EA runs the server parks cheap, so we are bundled up with other HIGH latency far out of region players to play on the same single server box.

We had the option on Community run servers in the past to set a max latency threshold for players to join/not get kicked.  And it was a true delight to play on those!

I ran a survey 1-2 years back to hear the sentiment here on this BF forum across players what latency level they found acceptable to play with enemies on.  The hard stop came already around 80 to max 100ms.  And especially the PC gamers (who knows and played with this option the longest) were the hardest judges on this term.  While console gamers tended to be ok with latencies upwards to max 140-160ms. 

Current state in BF2042 is terrible.  No other word to describe it.  But also driven by the fact that there are simply no longer enough players around to make servers viable across all world regions.  (though one could argue this was exact reason for bringing in the AI soldiers...).  So fact is that we (like me here in Europe with a latency of 16-22ms to European servers) are typically playing with players also joining from e.g. South America and Japan, despite their latencies are up in the 600-1,200 ms range on our European servers.

Good luck to the Lag Compensation to make that look pretty...

Because it ain't !

[RayD_O1]

@CyberDyme
Good post, very informative and helps explain a lot.

[OskooI_007]

@RayD_O1 I agree with everything you said. Lag compensation basically comes down to high ping players being able to run around corners and shoot you before you can even see them.

This is possible because they're actually running a few footsteps ahead of where you see them on your screen.

[emerson1975]

The big trouble with lag compensation is the time given before the server starts to deny hits on the low ping player, if this is kept low it’s not much of an issue because you hardly feel it.

The problem starts to get a lot worse when you have poor server coverage and have to give high ping players a longer time to kill before the server starts to deny hits and that’s why it’s got worse due to low player counts thus meaning turning  servers off.

[CyberDyme]

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@emerson1975 wrote:

The big trouble with lag compensation is the time given before the server starts to deny hits on the low ping player, if this is kept low it’s not much of an issue because you hardly feel it.

The problem starts to get a lot worse when you have poor server coverage and have to give high ping players a longer time to kill before the server starts to deny hits and that’s why it’s got worse due to low player counts thus meaning turning  servers off.

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Exactly right @emerson1975 ,

If EA had enforced a max latency threshold on the HIGH latency players that the game would max compensate for, then instead it would have been a discussion about where that threshold then should be set.

Fact is however when messaging exchanging with the HIGH latency far out of region players I have observed in the game here on European servers, we have players with up around 1,400-1,800 ms of latency.  So for me to get hitmarkers on them in the game, do I honestly need to aim like 1.5-2.0 seconds ahead of them where I would think there now are versus the image I see of them in the game???

For what we observe factually in the game right now is that these HIGH latency players do not have any limitations to getting their shots registered when shooting at the easy pray LOW latency players.  Honestly zero incentives currently for the poorly connected players to get their internet connections optimized and/or connect to local servers instead. 

Right now it is the players who cares about good and fair gaming with decent internet lines to their own regional servers that pays the price of having terrible poor gaming experiences when EA caters to the HIGH latency players like this.

[DeepSixxxx]

@CountSero I agree CountSero.

I think the real difficulty with BF net code is having 128 players on one server, running 3-5 different platforms, without enough players online at one time to allow MM system to group players at acceptable average latency (pings) to allow a consistently smooth gaming experience. For example, I do know that I have a better experience in portal TDM/Rush/Hardcore when there are 16x16 or less players. 45 Hz is no problem on a small map, without ground or air vehicles, with only 32 or less total players to track. What is unusual is I can compete on a 130ms server as good if not better than a 40ms server in Portal, so also the reason I believe 130ms is inside the sweet spot. The real issues IMHO is when 250-300ms players with packet loss connect, and the BF lag compensation simply can't compute reality anymore. Server browsers and/or dedicated rental servers with latency limits solves most of these issues, but Dice seems to have painted themselves into a corner as MM has issues filling now, and so adding any other player drain to MM will simply make it worse and make it even more difficult to finalize their obligations to season pass holders. What a mess, right?

As for Apex, tick rate is only 20Hz, yet the entire map and all variables are refreshed each tick rate, unlike BF 2042 which has the "zone refresh" which like you said creates a whole new set of issues. Plus Apex has only 60 players max, only one transport type that doen't even shoot, "cartoon graphics", no air vehicles, etc. Also Apex increases and decreases the amount of bandwidth to each player as necessary, etc. Honestly Apex is a work of art when it comes to net code, I wish they would have copied it form BF 2042 and kept player maximums at 64 players, yet the BF battle royal attempt pushed it to above 100 so thanks Fortnite...

And your comment of having 45fps with 45 Hz, been there, done that. My Xbox Series X isn't capable of handling Hourglass 128 player AOW, and my fps drops from 119 (my TV doubles the 60fps for smoother gameplay) to the mid 40 fps, and I have to disconnect as it is like being in a dark room with a strobe light flashing on and off. Note the Xbox Series X is capable of 120fps if a game is programmed efficiently, but obviously BF 2042 has some really serious net code programming inefficiencies if it has to drop from 60fps to only 45fps on a platform that other developers are already pushing to 120 fps...

Yet honestly I don't blame Dice, if the suits at EA would have given them back the 3-6 months lost during the pandemic, this game would have been super clean IMHO...

[DeepSixxxx]

What Dice may not be giving enough attention to is the fact that humans don't like "unfair".  Just watch someone cut in line and see what happens, people get upset quickly, in mass. 

Like an unfair referee, the net code will ultimately be the buzzkill that gets more players to quit versus stick around at higher ping levels.  So in reality, Dice makes the issues worse as low latency players stop playing as they get one shot constantly and killed behind cover, and high latency players ironically get much better with magic bullets that track around corners and up ladders and stairs like the screenshot of me below in TDM running 40ms ping Xbox, getting killed with magic bullets from a high ping Xbox player down a ladder and around the corner. 

When the BF referee/net code keeps cheating low latency players at ever increasing rates as the game keeps losing player count, at some point the majority of low latency gamers patience will run out, and the servers will be filled with high latency players.  So in the end Dice is only making the issues worse long term with the latest net code changes after Season 1 launch....the irony, right???

[Ironhead841]

@DeepSixxxx 

This thread has definitely been one of the most informative and eye-opening on here. 

But unfortunately, as I have said in other well thought out constructive posts on here which EA/Dice chose to ignore, the chance of them acknowledging, much less actually addressing this issue is virtually ZERO.