Quoting twifightDG, reply 20
Well the example I quoted (without source) was related to driving a car. When a kid jumps in front of your car what do you do? Brake? Steer away? That takes about 800 ms or as said above about 700. I think that situation is closer to "a demigod popped up behind me, what do I do, fight or run?" that it is to "I hear a sound and click a button". But debate it all you like, it's not really ontopic, so I appologize for brining it up, it caused quite a stir.
As for "(...) why one would believe a global connection is less prone to be unstable than a regional one." They are not. It is equal. So why kick an Australian? They have just as much chance to cause game problems as any other player in the lobby.
I still ask where do you get this number (above 700). But you're right, OT.
As for global connections being equally likely to be stable when compared to regional ones, you are just plain wrong when you say they are equal. Longer distances almost invariably mean more routers to go through, which almost invariably means more instability. What if one link gets overloaded on the way there (more likely with more links). That means your packet is put in a queue, which means queuing delay, which means some packets take much longer to deliver than others, which mean instability. Also, what happens when the link is REALLY overloaded and the packet gets dropped by the router because there is no room in the queue? Instability. Also, what about when a link goes down? It takes time for networks to "recover" and learn available and later optimal alternative routes to reroute the packets. Instability.
Oh, and let's look at the distance. There are timeout mechanisms built into networking protocols that adapt to the round trip times of packets sent. Thus, if the RTT is 1 ms, a timeout may occur if no acknowledgement for a packet is sent within 2ms. Longer RTT times (which global networking DOES have vs. regional networking) means longer timeouts which means having to wait longer for a connection to recover when a packet is dropped. Instability.
I appreciate you being polite in this discussion, but I am a PhD student in computer science and I know what I'm talking about on this. Netlag is BS. "Ping doesn't matter" is BS. Americans are not ignorant for kicking high-ping players. Global networking is more prone to being unstable than regional networking. Seriously, /thread.
All true, but the real problem is that Stardock don't tell you enough information. Ping really only shows a small amount of the story (especially with the fixed 350ms netlag). Sim Speed is perhaps the most vital bit of information you would want before a game, because especially in the larger sized games there's always someone with a bad pc/high setting which makes the game far more unplayable than any <0.5s action delay. Instability - the greatest source of this is perhaps directly from the user. I've had many games with low pings, but once the game starts someone's ping goes through the roof because their connection cannot handle the bandwith requirement of sending the requests in game. This is the biggest game ruiner of them all and nothing to do with ping. I'd much rather play with someone who has a 400ms ping and I know has a good connection and PC than someone with a 50ms ping who is an unknown quantity.
Unfortunately the OP was unable to do it without creating a stir, so people with 200-350ms pings will still get booted 90% of the time.
Naturally you can appreciate the fact that people want to play with those geographically close for cultural if not technical reasons, but completely shutting people down gets a bit tiresome after a while when every other major RTS released in the last 4 years is truly global.
