200ms of lag is irrelevant if

Short of rollback netcode I doubt everyone will have the ability to play as if local when online. Ensuring the minimal number of buffered simframes is good, but that's the best that can be done.

Also, seriously those suggestions? Those are all things that take several seconds if not minutes to do, and can all be queued up at will. The difference of 1/5s won't break queuing.

Oh, I wasn't sure if you were pointing out times where ping times matter (which is basically just Raider micro, and not always then) or exaggerating for effect to point out how silly complaints about ping in a game that isn't an FPS or Fighting game are.

That being said, lower ping is still more responsive, and this feels nicer to play. But that's more a simframe overbuffering issue than a networking one (once again, short of rollback netcode which isn't that feasible for RTS, AFAIK).

Shush kaen! But what about those long, extremely close and usually super-exciting-to-watch tournament games where even a fart in another universe can affect the outcome!! Huuuuh?

Human reaction time is 200ms, but that doesn't mean we experience life in 200ms chunks. The issue with input delay is that the 200ms between command and action is still perceived by the player (after the fact in their memory, but still perceived), and it still feels clunky, even if they wouldn't be able to respond to changes within that time frame.

Also, Supreme Commander is one of the most clunky feeling games to play. A large reason why I play Zero-K is because Supreme Commander didn't really make anything of the realistic physics in any meaningful moment-to-moment way in the way Zero-K emphasizes. That 500ms latency is part of that (not all, part of it is also the super-high build speeds, but the latency really doesn't help)

As I've mentioned before, barring some miraculous compression algorithm for RTS game states, the best that can be done, apart from having several servers to give everyone low ping times, is to keep the game's added latency as low as possible, which basically means to ensure jitter is properly accounted for.

In the past whenever I've had bad ping, I typically cant play LoL or CS:GO or anything so I just play ZK, this game is best game during lag times

some games handle lag terribly and constantly disconnect or become unplayable but this game is great, you barely even notice it

Personally, I am excited for the several hundred elo I will instantly gain as a result of my now incredibly low ping:

PING zero-k.info (158.69.140.0) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 158.69.140.0: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=82.5 ms

quote: Also, some people's reactions can be as low as 100ish ms, effectively giving them negative lag XD

I hope you don't mean that literally.
To react to sometimes happening on screen you have reaction time + input delay + network latency to server.
Before that you would also have Network latency from server + output delay.

240ms ? Prove it SnuggleBass: http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

I have to disagree, ping really DOES matter.

The loss of the first one two raiders, that can be addressed to bad ping/lag, have a huge impact of the rest of the game.

Being late with your build queue does not impact the outcome of the first raider battle. It will probably impact it's location though. Consistent micro of the first major engagement with glaives and/or rokos has, again, a huge impact on the outcome. With good ping and reaction you can dodge every roko rocket with up to 3-4 units. With >200 ping roko's will be able to hit again.

First, I'll address your curiously specific hypothetical situations with my own:

quote: Being late with your build queue does not impact the outcome of the first raider battle

Metal is definitely more important than ping, even in the first raider battle. If I build one too many solars in my initial queue, you show up with 5 glaives to my 4, etc. I thought this particular blunder was well-known (I know GF has mentioned it more than once).

Also, if you ignore my raiders, hitting a vulnerable mex or con instead, and I suicide into an LLT + your commander, latency never comes in to play to begin with.

Human decision making is kind of shitty, and certainly much shittier than modern network performance.

quote: Consistent micro of the first major engagement with glaives and/or rokos has, again, a huge impact on the outcome

Are you sure you should be microing those glaives? If you plant a tick in the right place you won't have to micro anything at all.

quote: With good ping and reaction you can dodge every roko rocket with up to 3-4 units. With >200 ping roko's will be able to hit again

Again, you're wasting macro time with something that fight move does reasonably well. Even better: if your enemy has enough rockos to break auto-jink, build a pheonix, or cloak a warrior, or build some scythes, or wait in a blind spot.

These examples characterize my point pretty well. Ping affects only the high-micro solution. In most situations, there is a solution that simply removes micro from the equation. It is the player's failure to get enough information, and make the correct decision in response to it, that is the dominating factor in most (virtually all) losses.

--//--

My thesis is really only based on one simple idea: human error in decision-making and execution is vastly greater than the error introduced by latency. Maybe in a handful of the most perfectly executed 1v1s of all time, ping was the deciding factor. However, in the vast majority of public 1v1s, and even tourny games, this is simply not the case.

Godde, Drone, and everyone above you on the ladder is an existence proof of potential improvements to your play style. I posit that your (speaking to the abstract ZK player) large-scale game decisions are sub-optimal, and that those should be addressed before you can reasonably assert that ping is the dominating factor in your performance.

Yes, ping can affect your execution, but you are almost certainly not executing the right thing 100% of the time, and you should fix that before blaming something external to yourself.