6d ago

How come modern multiplayer games don't show ping/latency?

It's always been useful in figuring out if you need to lead or trail a target more in a shooter, but all these modern shooters have taken that bit out of the scoreboard.

Checking out The Finals and for the first few games, I thought it used projectiles for the guns because I hit more often shooting ahead of moving targets, only to find they are indeed hitscan and hit better when actually looking directly at the dude when nobody is lagging.

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If the game's net code is good, you shouldn't have to lead or trail. But yeah, it's annoying not being able to see it.
Perhaps they don't want you to know how shit their servers are lol

Because they hired UI/UX people who aren’t very technical and they told them that red numbers and technical jargon makes people sad.
So the product manager who’s never played the game decides to drop it along with anything else the UI/UX and Marketing people say they don’t like.
The actual developer and artists argue otherwise, but they get told that they’re “not the target market”, because they have… opinions.
So they release the game and nobody buys it. The product manager then shifts from talking about day 1 sales to how they’re influencing the industry and the game’s success will be felt wider than just sales figures while quietly finding another project in its infancy to attach to.
The UX/UI people are floating in the company so they’re already on the new project saying that “umm ya’know I don’t really get… modding or servahs”
The developers are told the failure is their fault and they need to fix it and the artists are told to come up with 6 new character designs that are contractually sourced from the latest collaboration with Peppa Pig and have strict requirements where Peppa Pig can’t be shown in the same room as Sal the big mean butcher at the same time.
And that’s the story of Concord.
(and why you don’t get pings anymore)

Probably for the same reason modern cars don't have an oil pressure sensor these days. Too many users don't know how to parse the information.
- I don't really believe that. For either of them. You don't have to be a computer expert to know that high ping is bad, and you don't have to be a mechanic to know that the oil pressure gauge moving away from the middle of its range means something serious is going wrong. I think it's because corporations don't want us to understand what's going on when things go wrong, not because people would be incapable of understanding if given the information.
  
  I can tell you people many people with oil gauges ignored the gauges, and people with oil lights ignore those too. Only avid users of something look at information and adjust behaviour. The assumption is all gamers are data parsing types, there are a lot that aren't.
  
  Pretty much all cars have an oil pressure switch these days. Meaning once the oil pressure goes above a certain threshold the oil pressure gauge goes to the good range. It doesn't move until the oil pressure drops below that threshold. Essentially it hides the actual oil pressure, which can fluctuate based on RPM, temperature, wear, and oil used. I don't know how many times I've had friends, family, or coworkers think they have a problem because their oil pressure is moving while driving, or it's at a different but perfectly fine part of the gauge.
  I don't think people are incapable of understanding. I think they don't bother to try or have the time to.
  
  I dunno, I remember way back in StarCraft the original, everyone upon entering a game would immediately change their setting sto Very High Latency...because who the fuck knows why.

It just adds to player frustration with no benefit to 99% of the player base who wouldn’t do anything with that information anyway
The other 1% would do a trace route anyway
Though I do appreciate knowing which server to join

If I can see that it isn't lag then how am I supposed to blame lag when I fuck up?

I can't think of a game that doesn't have it, unless you mean for your teammates and opponents? That seems like an obvious way to reduce toxicity, and avoid giving info to people trying to DDOS their opponents. Modern games you don't need to lead or trail your shots based on latency, if it hits on the shooters screen it will hit. this is often called "favour the shooter".
- It looks like The Finals doesn't, but I think most other games do.

Good games do. Playing Marvel rivals, it has ping, network meter, etc
- I want to enjoy this game but I just can not wrap my head around all the heroes and their abilities. There's way too many of them.
  Which is odd, because I didn't have much issue figuring out Overwatch during the open beta back in 2016. Am I just getting old in my 30s, or is Marvel Heroes legitimately more complex than OW was back then?
  
  It's the kind of thing you just learn over time as you play. It can be pretty brutal early on tho.
  It could be worse- first MOBA I really got into was Smite and there's ~130 characters in that game.
  
  I hear you. It's worth a play, but there are 30ish heroes all with some what unique abilities and counters. It can be overwhelming..

It used to be the first thing you checked on 56k.
Hold tab for the score and stats, see if your pingtime was under 350, and crack on.
There was a certain art to playing as an HPB, especially when ISDN or leased lines were the domain of the rich and famous... and students.
These days, it seems that anything over 30 is... suboptimal, and only single digit pingtimes are good enough for competitive non-LAN play.
That said, before multiplayer was centralised, you checked the server pingtime before joining the server. Private servers seem to be a dying breed now.
- That said, before multiplayer was centralised, you checked the server pingtime before joining the server.
  Scrolling through servers on CS:Source trying to find one that wasn't pinging harder than my anxiety... Those were the days.

There's still a way to do it but it's convoluted compared to if they'd just add a damn resource monitor into the game itself.
If you still care about figuring out your ping: this comment on reddit from a year ago tells you how to find your games server IP, from there you can just fire up command prompt and hit with ping -n 100 <IP/Adress> This should return your ping and packet loss with the server.

Probably UX designers decided that's too difficult and confusing for most users
- I guess most users (and by extension, UX designers) are maroons

Because modern audiences don't ask for it.

Rocket League does..
- It's not exactly modern, and it also doesn't even really matter much. You're not trying to hit anyone (well, not most of the time anyway) and since everything is server side, you'd visually see who is lagging. Either you're rubber banding, or the other players are. lol
  
  Uhh. It matters a lot. When someone hits the ball and your client thinks it went one way then the server thinks it went the other way, the ball will rubber band. Over the course of a match tens of such events can add up and cost the game. Try playing at 150 vs 8 ping.

This drives me nuts in The Finals as well. I also really want to know what my opponents' pings are, because sometimes it feels like they're exploiting the unlagged netcode with high ping. Edit: And don't give me a little 3 bar signal strength graph - I need numbers.
FYI also in case you didn't know, the sniper rifle for light in The Finals is hitscan up to 40m away, then after that it has travel + bullet drop. This was introduced in a patch about 6 months ago. (I don't think the Pike for medium is hitscan at any range.... someone correct me though)
- Pike is hitscan, as is any actual gun except the ks and sniper.
  But i don't think just showing ping will fix anything within the finals with how shit the servers have become over the last updates.

Di you know that on windows, the resource monitor will show latency for all tcp connections?
- wouldn't be able to see only yours?
  edit: sorry, i was thinking on an client-server arch where the server is not your pc
  
  It just lists active tcp connections and their stats including latency. But as someone said most games need in-server support for timing as they use udp
- TCP isn't used for low latency games
  
  Well - as udp is is stateless theres really no way to measure outside of special handling in the server code.

Yes, the game should account for latency as much as it can, so a conscious decision to lead or trail probably won't help. It's more useful for debugging sort of purposes imo, like figuring out if your network is slow or if it's just the person you're playing against.
- How it helps in knowing to lead or trail comes from knowing how much time delay to add or remove from the target so it actually counts as a hit. If I am low ping and my target is high ping, I'm gonna want to trail the target as they will be slightly behind where I am actually seeing them. If they have low ping and I have high ping, I need to aim a bit ahead of them because they are further along than what I see (though because it uses projectiles, I'd still have to lead a moving target).
  It really depends on the kind of hit detection used. In totally client side hit detection, like Battlefield, as long as I can see them I can hit them by having my bullets hit what I see. But if the game is server side detection, like Counter-Strike, knowing everyone's latency is a huge help.
  
  Counter Strike has pretty cool networking code where the server will rollback the simulation based on your latency, to see if you would've hit based on your own interpretation of the world as at your time, so no, even in Counter Strike, you shouldn't need to lead. That being said, there are limits. It's not going to work properly if your latency is 1000ms. Also in CS 2 they improved this even more because they do sub tick simulation to be even more precise.

Has been a while since the last time I played a modern multiplayer game due my low spec laptop, It's always a new world to me every time that I'm able to play something new, because I can see how nowdays games have tamed the gamer with almost everything

Very common in Blizzard games. Didn't know for years that they had no servers in my country, it finally made sense as to why I had bad connection at the best of times

download gamespy man

And even if they show the ping it's often a lie... Best example is Diablo 4 half a year back... In-game showed around 60ms when in reality it was like more than half a second +
Network tools showed always at least triple the amount the game tried to let you believe.
IMO publishers and devs are using shortcuts and trying to hide it...

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