08/25/01
Ping Matterss
  
    You know, PING! As in lag time. The action of contacting a server and then waiting 
for a reply. I've heard people complain that people use lag as an excuse for how much 
they suck. You weren't killed by lag, you were killed because you just suck at playing, 
you react too slow. Well that may be partially true, but then of course you react too 
slow when you see things happen half a second behind everyone else. Or even a full 
second behind, like I used to.
  
    This comes from experience people. When I was on dial up, I regularly has a Counter 
Strike ping of around 1000. That's 1000 milliseconds. Ok, they are only milliseconds, 
but consider, a milli second is one-onethousandth of a second, so 1000 milliseconds is 
the same as 1 full second. hings occur 1 second after they really occur. I see a guy 
jump out to shoot me, I react, I see me pull the trigger before I see him shoot, but 
it doesn't matter, he saw me and kiled me then ran off 1 full second earlier. He is 
long gone.
  
    But now I'm on a nice slick high speed LAN line through school. I can download a 
full megabyte or more per second. To get an idea of that for you people on dial up, 
remember that MP3 you downloaded in 20 minutes last night? I could have downloaded it 
in about 5 seconds, and I've done that before. But that is not the complete subject, 
we are talking about in game lag. Now when I play Counter Stike, I get a pink of less 
than 100 miliseconds. Now I'm the guy who sees things before they happen. On Dial up 
I was lucky to ever get a kill, now that I'm on the LAN my first game I walked away 
with 13 kills, after a fairly short game. Not exceptional, but then I'll admit I'm not 
the best player. The point is when I get in a fire fight I actually have a chance, I 
actually get to fire. As opposed ot before when I probably looked like I was just 
standing there dying to the other player. So the point is, when someone tells you that 
lag is a poor excuse, be sure to not send them my way. Because I may be a LPB now but 
I still pretty much suck a lot.
  
    NOTE: This does not apply to Diablo II. Not only has 1.09 made the game disconnect 
more times a day than I've ever had previously over months, but the game has terrible 
shitty net code and lags like hell even on a LAN.