Practice English Speaking&Listening with: High Ping Advantage A Hoax? Low System Latency The Real Advantage?

Hi my name is Chris and this is Battle(non)sense

Today I have something special for you

And big shoutout to nvidia for sponsoring this video

and their interest in todays topic which is a quite sensitive one.

Is it possible for a player to gain an unfair advantage by playing with a very high ping?

The answer to this question is quite complex and depends on the decisions the developer

made when it comes to how a game deals with delays

and how hits get registered.

This is why the answer that I will provide in today’s video is specific to PUBG

and might not apply to many if any other game out there.

To answer the same question for another game I would have to test that game specifically.

So please do not apply what you will learn in todays video to any other game than PUBG.

Now since this is a very complex topic that frequently sparks very heated discussions,

I knew that I to make sure that my explanation is as simple and easy to understand as possible.

This is why you won’t hear me talk about the tickrate,

update rates and server processing delays today.

Nevertheless, you might still have to watch this video several

times and maybe even sleep over what I am about

to show you to fully understand how shots register in

PUBG, how that affects your online experience,

as well as what can and what cannot be used to gain an advantage.

So, to find out if you can use a high ping to gain an advantage in PUBG

I placed 2 PC’s side by side and then recorded my tests at 250FPS with

a camera.

That allows me to show you the perspectives of both

the player with the low as well as the player with the high ping

without any video editing.

To increase the ping of player 2 I again use the Softperfect Connection Emulator,

a quite expensive tool which is also used by developers and network engineers

to simulate various network conditions to test applications and services during development.

So that is a professional tool capable of simulating real network conditions.

In the following examples I have increased the ping of player 2 by 500ms

to make the impact that this has on the hit registration as obvious as I possibly can.

However, I did also run tests at 150ms

as well as 250ms. So be assured that what I am about to show

you is not specific to playing at a ping of 516ms.

So, the popular opinion is that a player gains an unfair advantage from playing at a high

ping because he can run around a corner and kill

you before you can even see him.

So, at a ping of 516ms, player 2 does indeed see player 1 first

and so he can open fire before he shows up on the monitor of player 1.

But how does this delay affect the hit registration?

In this example player 1 fires first After 8ms his shot reaches the server

And the server then sends a data packet to player 2 to tell him that he is dead.

While that information travels to player 2 he also fires a shot at player 1.

But the server then just ignores that shot as player 2 was already dead when it arrived

at the server.

In the next example Player 2 shoots first But because of his ping of 516ms,

That shot needs 258ms to reach that server.

While that damage is traveling to the server, player 1 now fires at player 2

And 8ms later that shot arrives at the server, which now sends a data packet to player 2

informing him that he got killed.

When the shot from player 2 then finally arrives at the server

it gets ignored, because player 2 is already dead as far as

the authoritative server is concerned

So the server, simply does not care about the fact that player

2 shot first.

When it comes to damage, then the player who gets his shot to the server

first, wins the gunfight. It really is as simple as that in PUBG.

Now let’s have a look a different example.

So what happened here.

Player 2 comes around the corner, sees player 1

and almost instantly starts to fire. 2 shots were enough to kill player 1

and these 2 shots are on their way to the server before player 2 even shows up on the

monitor of player 1

now player 2 shows up on the monitor of player 1,

while the 2 shots of player 2 still haven’t even reached the server

But player 1 does not manage to fire back at player 2 fast enough

as player 2 did not only open fire almost instantly when player 1 showed up on his monitor

it also only took 2 shots to kill player 1. So player 1 loses this gunfight.

Now lets look at this.

This time it took player 2 a little bit longer

to open fire This gives player 1 enough time to fire back

at player 2

And thanks to the low ping of just 16ms As well as the fact that player 1 only needs

2 shots to kill player 2 he wins that engagement and player 2 dies.

So these tests show us that the server does not care about which player shot first.

It only cares about who gets his shot to the server first.

Let’s take a look at this graph to explain that further.

The ping of the attacker, the player who comes around the corner first

is completely irrelevant because as you’ve seen

the server does not care about who shot first.

So, what matters for the attacker is the time between identifying an enemy

and killing that player.

For the defender to win that engagement he must be able to kill the attacker quicker

in order to also compensate for the delay between him and the server.

So, the attacker cannot use a high ping to his advantage

as the ping is irrelevant for the attacker.

For the defender on the other hand it is essential to play at the lowest ping possible

because the higher his ping the longer the delay between him and the server.

So if Time A is shorter than Time D, then the Attacker wins the engagement.

And if Time D is shorter than Time A, then the Defender wins that engagement.

Again, to keep things simple I ignore the tickrate,

update rates and server processing delays here.

But you should get the idea.

So the only situation where you will die in PUBG with no chance to respond

is when you have a high ping as a defender. You will be dead before you know it

with no time to respond because of the time it takes data to travel

back and forth between you and the server.

Once your ping is higher than about 60ms as a defender

you will have a very hard time to get Time “D” shorter than Time “A”,

unless the attacker can’t aim, or has a much worse gun.

So there is no way for you in PUBG to use a high ping to your advantage.

Playing at a high ping is a major disadvantage as you have little chance to survive 1 on

1 gunfights, doors will open with a noticeable delay which

gives a low ping player on the other side more time to kill you,

it takes longer to get in and out of vehicles and picking up stuff from the ground also

takes longer when you play at a high ping.

But, while playing at a high ping does not give

you an advantage, it will cause that other players receive your

shots behind cover.

Which is annoying and extremely frustrating when you have a low ping to the server.

That said, the shooter does not have an advantage here.

When both have a ping of 16ms then he still gets hit, just not that far behind cover.

What makes this so frustrating though is that the developer could do something to mitigate

how much of an impact the bad connection of another player is allowed to have on your

experience, when you have a stable and low latency connection to the server. But that

is a topic for another day.

If the player who is diving behind cover has a high ping

Then…. Well….

when the defending player has a high ping then his experience is not a good one no matter

how high the ping of the attacker is.

So since you cannot use a high ping to gain an advantage,

what can you do to improve your odds to win a 1 on 1 gunfight?

No matter if you are the attacking or the defending player,

you obviously want to improve your aim and recoil control

so that you can kill an enemy as fast as possible, right after he shows up on your monitor.

To see an enemy as soon as possible you want to reduce your system latency as

much as you can.

That means that you must play at a high frame rate

and use a high refresh rate monitor, ideally one that supports a variable refresh

rate as that then also eliminates the distracting

tearing and stutter and it makes tracking moving enemies a lot

easier. A gaming mouse with a polling rate of at least

500Hz will also further reduce the latency in your system.

And you want to play at the lowest ping possible because the higher your ping

the higher your risk to have that delay be the reason why you cannot get your shots to

the server fast enough to kill the attacker that just came around

the corner.

Now, I understand that many players won’t be happy with the explanation that I provided

here as the popular believe that high ping players

have an advantage is a very strong one.

However I hope that I could clearly demonstrate that this is not the case,

in PUBG at least.

As I said, I cannot be sure if the same applies to other games before I test them.

So for now, please do not assume that this is applies

to other games than PUBG.

And that’s all for today. Big shout out to my patrons as their support

allows me to create videos like this one.

If you enjoyed this video then please give it a like

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my next video and I hope to see you next time!

Until then, have a nice day

and take care,

my name is Chris and this was Battle(non)sense