I don’t believe you. An fps with ping as massive as over 1000 would be straight up unplayable
That’s over a full second of delay! In an fps I routinely do split second maneuvers and reactions. If someone I was shooting at wouldn’t be able to react to what I was doing for at least a full second, I would easily dominate them every single time
believe it or not. this was early 2000s, so everyone outside of major cities had shitty internet.
I had the fastest connection in my small shit town at 1.5mbps.
I also don’t believe you, and here’s why:
Halo CE didn’t have lag compensation, so with 2 seconds of latency you would have to lead your target by 2 seconds. Shooting anyone who wasn’t standing still would be a complete guessing game - I think you too would also classify that as unplayable (source).
Halo 2 seems to not be well documented - it looks like it’s using some form of rudimentary rollback, which can deal with higher latency but you’d need it very stable to avoid opponents teleporting constantly. It’s also unclear if it would handle 2s of latency, as that would increase both CPU and memory utilization of servers. If you’re getting a variance of 700ms as you claimed this most certainly wouldn’t be playable. High ping being stable is also hard to believe, naturally the higher the latency the higher the absolute variance.
Halo 3 uses synchronous lockstep networking with a ~300ms window (source). If you’re not in that window your actions are rejected, so quite literally unplayable at 2s. I think this is more evidence that bungie would’ve had a <2s maximum latency in their earlier title.
My best guess is you’ve either misremembered the latency (130-200ms is about what I’d expect from rural internet at that time), or you were playing peer-to-peer with your friends and so internet latency didn’t matter. I myself have played plenty of multiplayer games at over 100 ping and while it can be annoying I’d certainly call it playable, but not 10x that.
thanks for hyper analyzing.
it was Halo 1 on the original Xbox early 2000s.
oh wait, halo 1 on original Xbox didn’t have Xbox live, right?
my friends and I would use a shared internet connection over our local PC with dual nics. software was running that would basically create a flat network VPN that would show us all as-if we on a LAN. think of it like xlink-kai before it was a thing. I can’t remember the software name but we would use it for pc games like diablo, c&c, aoe, unreal, etc.
it was my idea to use it for Xbox with the network connection sharing on windows.
latency was a problem, but we still could play and it was enjoyable enough we’d do it weekly.
I don’t always get 1.5mbps now and 1000ping doesn’t work in a shooter. Depends on the game, some will make you basically unable to move, sometimes you basically warp around visually and fuck all happens, sometimes it seems fine but you die to people that don’t exist because you have a second of delay.
I was dealing with spikes of 2000 to 10000 ping yesterday on Minecraft and playable is not a word I would use to describe those spikes.
