Returning to Iron Banner after a Month Off... And I'm salty. (Destiny)

by Earendil, Thursday, April 30, 2015, 15:03 (3284 days ago) @ Kahzgul

The netcode in Destiny is simply infuriating. Before you say my connection must stink, I get 50 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up (and I checked many times last night because of the reasons I'm about to enumerate).

You may know this, but my moderately anal technology side has to point out a few things for other's sake, and maybe yours :)

Among all the primary ways to measure a network connection, bandwidth, latency, and packet drop rate, games care way more about the last two, assuming your bandwidth is better than a 56k modem. In general, modern broadband and infrastructure has allowed for near zero packet loss and amazing latency, and bandwidth is what we all care about. But, when a connection becomes "bad" it's usually not because the bandwidth has dropped, but that latency has gone way up, or more often the packet loss has increased.

Now, severe packet loss will have an effect on total bandwidth, but unlikely to be in a way you'd notice. Say you had 100mbs available, but experienced 20% packet loss, forcing both sides to resend 20% of the info. Your pipe will run closer to 80mbs because of this, but it's not being capped at 80mbs that is killing your connection, it's that a fifth of all info is lost, out of order, and being resent if applicable. Not a problem if you're downloading a large file (who cares what order it comes in) but games really tend to care.

I'm concerned about Trials of Osiris. Instead of being "who is the better team" it's going to be "who got luckier with bullshit lag glitches."

Of course, if you're like me, the more likely scenario is that your opponent was fiddling with their connection and causing intentional issues.

95% of the time though the games plays beautiful with no latency issues for me at all.