You people are taking the OP out of context. It was simply a very poor choice of wording. I seriously doubt he was trying to be offensive.

He was trying to be offensive since he was frustrated and angry. I think it's hilarious though.

-Listening to aussie whines about internet since 1999

well...can you not be selfish and understand we want our games not to lag, also?

250 ping is high for rts gaming.

Kids this is why you don't just read the first sentence of the OP's post.

Right...

Duuuudes stop crying about ping times. The most laggy thing in the game is your brain, as it takes an average person about 800 ms to respond to anything happening in the game. Too bad they show ping in some games as ppl think it's the 'holy grail' of multiplayer performance. I especially like the "I had a 250 ms player once and the game was laggy so it must have been him and i'll never let anyone with 150+ in my game again" posts. Way to go. Base all of your knowledge of DG MP on one experience which showed you no proof of any theory in the first place.

Humans respond to visual stimuli, on average, in less than a 1/4 of a second (250ms... seriously, google it...)

Where do you get 800?  Answer: Out of your arse.

As for "what about if the player with the highest latency isn't causing the lag".. sure, maybe sometimes.  But just admit that MOST OF THE TIME it's the guy with the highest latency causing the problem.  Then admit that getting quality matches together in this game is difficult, and you arrive at the conclusion to kick high-latencies to help ensure (albeit not guarantee) a problem-free match.  Then /thread.

Depends on how you define reaction time. In the game you also have to make a choice about what your reaction is. Maybe it should be called processing time. My arse isn't a great source of information, though it's a great source of something else I won't elaborate on.., but true, my source is an old tv show I saw about 10 years ago.

My point is, ping isn't the 'holy grail' of multiplayer performance most ppl make it out to be. Sure, you'd exclude a lot of people slowing down the game by not allowing 100+ ms in, but people like the TS would be left out.

Furthermore reading the forums it appears that sim speed seems to be a bigger problem than ping. Yet that's not the requirement people get kicked for in the lobby.

Thread derail complete.

pretty much anything related to computers and complaining it's 90% of the time going to be from a dingo stealing my baby.

No, they detect visual stimuli on an average of 2 to 3 tenths of a second. This average applied only to young adults in peak physical conditions. The ability to comprehend the stimuli, think rationally as how to react and begin reacting come after the detection. For example, the average Human reaction speed to an object jumping in front of your car while driving is around 7 tenths of a second in a young adult.

This post delivers.

After this forum post I'll never let and aussie join my game.

GG

http://biology.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reaction.htm

"For about 120 years, the accepted figures for mean simple reaction times for college-age individuals have been about 190 ms (0.19 sec) for light stimuli and about 160 ms for sound stimuli (Galton, 1899; Fieandt et al., 1956; Welford, 1980; Brebner and Welford, 1980). "

Reaction time. 

qft

Of course that's average.  No one is average.  My brain operates at about 12000 ms a second.  In fact, it took me 5 days just to write this post.

How about we define it as "visual stimuli-> you push a button".  Kind of like, I dunno, in a computer game.  Yeah, that's ~200ms.

Bigots??? What us....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr67Jp2Ylx0&feature

From your link:
The pioneer reaction time study was that of Donders (1868). He showed that a simple reaction time is shorter than a recognition reaction time, and that the choice reaction time is longest of all. Laming (1968) concluded that simple reaction times averaged 220 msec but recognition reaction times averaged 384 msec. This is in line with many studies concluding that a complex stimulus (e.g., several letters in symbol recognition vs. one letter) elicits a slower reaction time (Brebner and Welford, 1980; Teichner and Krebs, 1974; Luce, 1986). An example very much like our experiment was reported by Surwillo (1973), in which reaction was faster when a single tone sounded than when either a high or a low tone sounded and the subject was supposed to react only when the high tone sounded

The more complicated the stimuli, the longer the time for the brain to react. When you bring comprehenson and decisions into the picture rather than just knee-jerk reactions the time increased. Basically, the time it takes the brain to recognise light and sound is shorter, because they are very simple stimuli and require no decisions. In a game where you often have to react to whats occured and make choices, the reaction time increases significantly. Hence my original post giving the example of driving a car.

so worst case ("complicated reaction") it's 384 ms, half of the 800ms that was posted.  The point is, it doesn't take any flipping 800 ms to respond to stimulus no matter how you look at it.  Being off by (at least) a factor of 2 is pretty darn significant, and generally that happens when you pull numbers out of your arse.  75% of all statistics are made up, you know.

I'm still not convinced seeing something on the screen and pushing a button on your computer qualifies as particularly complex anyway.

In any event, I'm still waiting for the answers to a bunch of networking questions I posed in this thread centered around why one would believe a global connection is less prone to be unstable than a regional one.  Please do a good job of it; if I'm I like itI may be able to use it to impress my data communications professor .

Well the example I quoted (without source) was related to driving a car. When a kid jumps in front of your car what do you do? Brake? Steer away? That takes about 800 ms or as said above about 700. I think that situation is closer to "a demigod popped up behind me, what do I do, fight or run?"  that it is to "I hear a sound and click a button". But debate it all you like, it's not really ontopic, so I appologize for brining it up, it caused quite a stir.

As for "(...) why one would believe a global connection is less prone to be unstable than a regional one." They are not. It is equal. So why kick an Australian? They have just as much chance to cause game problems as any other player in the lobby.

Exhibit number 1

Exhibit number 2

I still ask where do you get this number (above 700).  But you're right, OT.

As for global connections being equally likely to be stable when compared to regional ones, you are just plain wrong when you say they are equal.  Longer distances almost invariably mean more routers to go through, which almost invariably means more instability. What if one link gets overloaded on the way there (more likely with more links).  That means your packet is put in a queue, which means queuing delay, which means some packets take much longer to deliver than others, which mean instability.  Also, what happens when the link is REALLY overloaded and the packet gets dropped by the router because there is no room in the queue?  Instability.  Also, what about when a link goes down?  It takes time for networks to "recover" and learn available and later optimal alternative routes to reroute the packets.  Instability.

Oh, and let's look at the distance.  There are timeout mechanisms built into networking protocols that adapt to the round trip times of packets sent.  Thus, if the RTT is 1 ms, a timeout may occur if no acknowledgement for a packet is sent within 2ms.  Longer RTT times (which global networking DOES have vs. regional networking) means longer timeouts which means having to wait longer for a connection to recover when a packet is dropped.  Instability.

I appreciate you being polite in this discussion, but I am a PhD student in computer science and I know what I'm talking about on this.  Netlag is BS.  "Ping doesn't matter" is BS.  Americans are not ignorant for kicking high-ping players.  Global networking is more prone to being unstable than regional networking.  Seriously, /thread.

Yes because as we all know 5v5 works perfectly so long as people have low pings.

Exhibit number 3.

5vs5 doesn't work because the networking backbone of this game is barely functional at 3vs3.  When the networking code in the game is semi-robust, you can bet 10 players with 50ms ping is bound to be more stable and playable than 10 players with 500ms ping.

So pipe down.