From a blog I wrote
Now it’s not rocket science to see that a point near to you is quick to get and a point further away takes longer to get to, obvious we think but to Microsoft and games designers it doesn’t appear so. I am based in the UK and only wish to play against players in my own country purely for the latency reason not players from Europe and most definitely not from further a field like America. Those of you familiar with network tools would have heard of ping, this basically sends some data to a point and times how long it takes. I ran some ping tests to random DNS and NTP servers around the world to show the difference between response times from my location this morning.
OpenNIC (UK)
Pinging synergy0.vm.bytemark.co.uk [89.16.173.11] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 89.16.173.11: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=56
Reply from 89.16.173.11: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=56
Reply from 89.16.173.11: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=56
Reply from 89.16.173.11: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=56
OpenNIC (Germany)
Pinging new.stejau.de [178.63.26.173] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 178.63.26.173: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=55
Reply from 178.63.26.173: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=55
Reply from 178.63.26.173: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=55
Reply from 178.63.26.173: bytes=32 time=22ms TTL=55
DNS Server in Portugal
Pinging ns2.netvisao.pt [213.228.128.6] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 213.228.128.6: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=55
Reply from 213.228.128.6: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=55
Reply from 213.228.128.6: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=55
Reply from 213.228.128.6: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=55
Italy
Pinging dns.server-italia.com [184.82.148.212] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 184.82.148.212: bytes=32 time=104ms TTL=55
Reply from 184.82.148.212: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=55
Reply from 184.82.148.212: bytes=32 time=104ms TTL=55
Reply from 184.82.148.212: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=55
- france.com
Pinging li342-104.members.linode.com [96.126.117.104] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 96.126.117.104: bytes=32 time=116ms TTL=46
Reply from 96.126.117.104: bytes=32 time=116ms TTL=46
Reply from 96.126.117.104: bytes=32 time=117ms TTL=46
Reply from 96.126.117.104: bytes=32 time=116ms TTL=46
Cisco (San Jose, CA, US)
Pinging 128.107.241.185 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 128.107.241.185: bytes=32 time=157ms TTL=110
Reply from 128.107.241.185: bytes=32 time=147ms TTL=110
Reply from 128.107.241.185: bytes=32 time=145ms TTL=110
Reply from 128.107.241.185: bytes=32 time=145ms TTL=110
As you can see the further away the higher the ping meaning the game software has to work out the difference between every player and the host or server in real time, which cannot be an easy task as the latency will fluctuate constantly. An easy way to reduce this would be to only match players in the same country which would be extremely easy to do with various filters. The obvious one is ping, which the game must use now to find matches but make it more aggressive in its criteria, MW3 searches for games under 50ms so that includes all of Europe and beyond for me as I have a good fibre connection but for most players in the UK that would include Europe. The second obvious filter is the region the actual 360 says it is in mine of course says UK. The third thing is IP, all ISP’s around the world have a range of IP’s that they can use, these could be used to filter out IP ranges not associated with UK based ISP’s.
Now MW3 only lets you find games via a matchmaking search but BF3 allows the player to pick the server they want to play on. This freedom of choice allows players to connect to servers which re not in their country to take advantage of the lag compensation the host or server applies to equalize the connections. I play on the UK on EA severs which have PGMR in their title and there is always plenty of non-UK based players. The European players you can expect because their ping response would be ok but double a UK player, but surely American players would never be pointed towards these servers via matchmaking and inevitably they always end up top of the leader board, this is blatantly taking advantage of the lag compensation.
I know some players want to play people in other countries so there should be an option for those who wish to do so. Also the criteria these games use to search on should be amended, at base level decrease the acceptable ping response for matchmaking to narrow down the field of search. The games we play in this current generation are amazing but only to be spoiled by frustratingly laggy games.
I have added a link to a fantastic explanation to this problem by cap00 give this video a like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reNPK8XD-k4&list=PL40B22E116213C3BF&index=1&featu re=plpp_video
