Suggestion: Auto-Kick high ping players

[Cujucuyo]

Hey guys! Love your servers and I've been playing on them for some time now, but I've been noticing a lot the high ping players popping up and it's kind of annoying as they have the typical ping advantage, around corners people with high ping will see you first and kill you not to mention that you can shoot first and kill them, but since it doesn't register on their side yet they have time to kill you. Most servers implement an auto kick for a ping higher than "x" amount which would be great to have applied.

Just a suggestion.

 

[PROACEX1]

For players over 200ms it really starts to effect gameplay due to human response time in older games so I wouldn't necessairly mind setting a ping limit if it would actually help resolve those issues.

tl;dr: It won't.
 

I'll just give an basic explanation of the issues and why a ping limit won't really help. Note that I'm not a Network IT guy so it won't be super-detailed. I'm also really bored at 4AM.

Ping is arbitrary. Having a high ping with the way modern games are designed, such as BF4, is far more detrimental to the user with the high-ping then the low-ping players. Why? Some modern games, such as BF4, have netcode that tracks the in-game physical location of the player/object/whatever. There are a lot of different reasons for why this is, so let's not go into those.

Everything is slightly delayed by servers in BF4 to allow checksums of the incoming data packets, allowing for data to be resent by request from the end-user. Thus low-ping isn't an issue for people playing on a server as it is for the user with +100-200ms: people will  have a delay in dying, in animations, in hit registry, and most other things in which a time-delay can occur. However, it is on the end of the user with high-ping, not anyone else.  Low-ping is pretty relevant in this case to being capable of good gameplay.

BF4 has another safeguard with the Network Smoothing option, this helps increase/decrease the network delay on the user's end so hit registry, location, and other animations will work as intended depending on the individual's ping. Set it as low as possible and you will notice that hit registry works much better but animations and coordinate information for locations can sometimes be delayed, causing tearing and other annoyances (this is all on the user's end still, not the server). The downside is that if you are experiencing lag or packet loss, this setting will increase the issues by a noticeable factor.

Teleportation, ghosting, and other such artifacts which are associated with high-ping are in reality due to packet loss. Packet loss and high-ping, given all other factors such as distance are equal, are really two separate sides of the same coin: crappy internet connections. This is why there is an association between high-ping, packet loss, and the issues you are describing.

Packet loss can go both ways, either the user or the server can have packet loss to the other.

There are issues with users who have different peering/routing from their ISP to connect with the server which can cause this problem. There could be issues with the connection not having enough bandwidth. The router could be a bottleneck. The firewall could be mess up the packets. There are a ton of ways that packet loss can occur.

Why packet loss? Packet loss is the actual issue at hand with what you are describing. And sadly it is a bit harder to track server side. It allows for a lot of different forms of "cheating" in that it gives the user with packet loss 0.2-0.5 seconds of response time versus players with stable, low-ping connections because the server has to adjust for the packet loss by updating the relevant data.

Games already have a built in threshhold for kicking people with packet loss, but it is normally set to an ungodly high-level of 50% or more (this is an arbitrary figure, but the point is that it takes an absolutely gigantic amount of packet loss to reach that threshhold). Packet loss is on the user's side of things the majority of the time after the most recent patches fixing the netcode, otherwise every user would experience the rubber banding simultaneously due to the server having mass packet loss. So what about removing players with packet loss by lowering the threshhold? Well, that becomes a PITA problem. Because users with perfectly good ping can suffer from a lightning strike a thousand miles away that messes up a server in the route to connecting to ours and then gets kicked even though his connection will restabilize in a few seconds. Or some other completely random thing like that. Anywho, the point is that everyone suffers from packet loss. Being able to figure out when packet loss is being triggered on purpose isn't easy. It is something that punkbuster already checks for, but the threshhold/margin of error is over time, complicating the issue further.

So the issue with an abitrary limit on ping is that it immediately removes many EU, Russian, South American, Canadian, and even USA players from being able to play on the server. They have high-ping, but other then latency issues on their end  the connections are stable, meaning there is no harm in hosting those users on the server. Except for the end-user's own misery in playing a game with really, really annoying delays. On the other hand, individuals with packet loss will still be able to join and cause misery for everyone regardless of the set limit since high-ping=/=packet-loss.

 

[CR8Z]

We have members all over the world with varying pings and we will not prevent these players from playing on their own server. 95% of the folks playing on our server do not report any problems due to high ping players. As proace pointed out, it doesn't really effect the server.

 

[vetusvir]

try turning down some of ur settings. i run at norm settings and no overclocking and have no lag to little lag. (some navy strike maps suck) if you want the kick ass pix and go hohohohohho at the screen then turn it up and lag.