About Lag Night (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, January 28, 2016, 09:47 (3463 days ago) @ unoudid

The first 4 or 5 games I played tonight were worse then any of my games on tuesday.

here's a fun one from tonight.

[snip]

Overall there was a ton of lag tonight and it didn't seem like anything was fixed.

Lag can't be "fixed". The speed of light, and therefore latency, is non-fungible.

The only things in the matchmaking equation that are fungible are Bungie's standards. Bungie can accept a wider skill rating match, a wider connection quality disparity match, or make players wait longer. If you waited the same time or longer for a match and still got lagging players, then there just weren't any better matches-- not within Bungie's old standards, and not within the new ones, either.

Nothing that Bungie can do is going to affect how badly a player lags in a game with you once the match has been made. The only thing it can do is affect how often you get that sort of match. Some players are likely going to see no improvement. Others, because of confirmation bias, will not see any improvement that does happen, because they're not actually expecting lag to improve, so when they see any lag, they say, "see, lag isn't better, it's worse!"

The problems could be:

People are lagswitching and Bungie either cannot detect them or is not detecting them. Players who should be banned are manipulating the game with impunity, and since they are not manipulating the connection before the game starts, matchmaking cannot take this into account. Those players appear to be good matches before the game starts.

Too many playlists. If it's actually true that the Destiny playerbase is receding, then the number of available buckets need to be reduced in order to give each bucket a larger player population to work with. Presumably any IB week is worse than any average week since it splits the playerbase between regular crucible and IB playlists. I probably should have thought of it earlier, but I suspect that's the answer to the question I asked last week about why people think "IB lag" is a separate thing from just normal crucible lag. Ditto for Trials, I suppose, although I would imagine that is a smaller group.

Skill boundaries still too high. Bungie may have adjusted the parameters to allow for a greater prioritization of connection quality, but not enough. Those who do see improvement probably aren't going to bother to mention it, and those who do not most definitely will. That's pretty much true of anything in Destiny these days.

I think a real problem here is that one of the most common complaints I see about Destiny competitive play modes is that the loot is RNG. Players win games and get nothing and feel cheated. But if Bungie were to reward performance, rather than participation, it would be imperative to make matches fair whenever possible, which means not just connection quality, but skill matches matter. If winners are going to crow that they deserve their loot, then they'd better earn it by beating players of equal skill or better, not beating up on noobs. This would seem to me to be especially important in Iron Banner and Trials.

This necessarily means lower quality matches with regards to lag, or longer wait times, or both.

The thing that I think is... funny, I guess? Is that Bungie could be unfair and that would probably please the loudest complainers and negatively impact players who would just leave the game silently. They could remove skill as a factor entirely, force all lagged players to play against each other, and a lot of the Twitter and forum whining would stop. A bunch of players would just stop playing and leave, and only Bungie would know or care, because people who either don't think they are good at the game or know their connection is poor generally expect to lose and don't complain much when they do. Losing a bit more often might be a bit less fun, but it just isn't twitter fodder like being on top of the kill board and getting a single blue engram.