If you lag, does everyone else lag???

[doomer]

I'm a gamer, and I play online games.  I heard and every gamer hears the myth that if you experience lag, such as having high latency, or over 200 ping, everyone else will lag.

A thread in a one of my favorite game's forums has an argument about this.
http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5208

Maybe set up the experiment on different types of internet connections, different types of computers, or maybe different game types like real time strategy, first person shooters, massively multiplayer role playing games, and other online games.

No matter how many scientific computer geniuses tell them the truth, some people just do not listen.

[Wandering Skeptic]

As a rare breed (female gamer), I'll speak up here and say that I've never experienced this. Both my husband and I do a lot of online/MMO gaming on several different platforms, and the only connectivity issues we've ever encountered were just when our modem has decided that it hates us and randomly fails.

Between the two of us, we probably log close to 12 hours of gameplay a day (card-carrying members of the No Life Club, indeed), most commonly on games like Call of Duty, Halo, Rainbow Six, Chromehounds, Star Wars Galaxies, et cetera. Even in games with upwards of 50 people playing at once, the only thing that happens when a person lags is that their character is kind of glitchy and slow.

Then again, it's always been my understanding that unless you have a solid high-speed connection, it's not even really worth it to play online at all. Heck, I don't even load games onto my computer, because I only have 512 MB or RAM. My husband's laptop has a full gig, so it became the gaming machine by default.

[CatmanSGA]

Well, in my experience with XBox Live, one person with a low connecton can lag an entire room, & usually results in that player being booted from the session.

[RogueSpidor]

First, you have to distinguish between connection latency and framerate.

Framerate is your system not handling the graphics processing as well as it should. That's your own system. Nobody else is affected by it.

Connection latency is caused by a slowdown anywhere from the server to your own system. Any node between those two points that has a slowdown issue will cause latency. Any system downstream from the slow node will experience this latency. So if there's a latent node, and 3 players, and one of them is on the slow node, but the other 2 are not, then only the player on the slow node will experience latency lag. The other two will have the normal connection speed.

[Leppy]

i play on the game "Garry's Mod" host a server, hosted for about 3 years, and i will tell you, theres servers that automaticly kick people with a certain amout of lag, and that's a VERY childish thing to do, because no matter how much some one lags, it doesn't cause a sort of "Chain Reaction", it depens on things like, if theres a bunch of objects with physics, then that should cause alot of lag, but no, if someone got 999 pings, but everyone else has only 100, thats because the guy thats lagging has a bad connection



Myth Busted