I must've missed something.... (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, July 06, 2016, 06:49 (3155 days ago) @ stabbim

It is certainly possible that the guy with Universal Remote is not lag switching and just has some kind of weird 20 Mbps down / 0.1 kbps up connection, but highly unlikely. The only scenario I can think of it old school satellite internet where you get sat data down but your upstream is still a 56k modem. They certainly exist, but it's pretty doubtful anyone with a current gen console would be suffering through those speeds (let alone uploading video over the phone like that).

That all makes sense if you're operating under the assumption that their connection is in a steady state like this all the time, where the upstream just has incredibly low maximum throughput. But generally, that's not going to be what causes sudden, brief losses of connectivity.

In my experience, brief and sudden losses in connectivity affect both upstream and downstream connections at the same time, and would not look like this (perfect downstream, zero upstream).

Maximum rates are only relevant to lag if something is causing the connection to hit its limit, and generally online games only need a couple hundred kbps (though I admit, I haven't investigated what Destiny uses).

Destiny should not require much, which is another reason that this sort of extreme lag on the upstream-only side of the traffic is highly suspicious. Granted that Destiny's constant peer to all peers networking is more taxing on net traffic than the average client to host connection, but it should not be more than the average host to client connection.

People with perfectly reasonable speed plans have trouble, and it could be due to momentary heavy traffic (either on the end-users home network, or just somewhere along the way), or something as simple as a shitty modem or wiring. I lived in a place once that had what should have been a good cable connection, but the wiring was crap and sometimes the modem would lose its link. Or to use a weirder case, there are people who have wireless systems acting as the last-mile connection from their ISP. In those cases, the radio at the ISP tower is typically much stronger than the one at the customer end, and yes, when there are issues it will tend to affect upstream more than downstream.

Of course these statements are true, but they would also all result in a loss of downstream fidelity which is not apparent in the videos.

To try to be 100% clear, I'm not saying lag switching wouldn't look like this. It probably would.

And I'm saying it 100% looks like this. I used to test online games. This is exactly what lag switching looks like. Can I say for certain this guy is lag switching? No, I can't. But it's close enough that if I were in his game I'd report him without hesitation for cheating and bad connection. Further incriminating evidence is the fact that this guy is also the top scorer in the game. People with general lag, while frustrating to play against, do not earn many points because - on their system - everyone else appears to be lagging as well.

I'm saying we don't have enough information to determine that it definitely IS lag switching. Only that that is one explanation which could fit the profile.

Which is exactly what I said. I can't prove this is cheating, but it sure as hell looks like cheating.

As an aside, the satellite setup you're thinking of is HughesNet. Back when I used to work for a wireless ISP, they were our main competitor. Really our only competitor in some places. They're still in business, although apparently their latest tech has ditched the phone line for upstream and gone to two-way satellite. FYI on that, though, if someone were using HughesNet, they would have major latency issues all-around, not just upstream. I tested a satellite connection once (fully satellite, down and up), and the latency was horrendous. Like 700-800ms round-trip. And that's constant (due to the distance it has to travel), not just sometimes. I'm not sure you could even play Crucible with that setup.

It's the only setup I could think of that would fit a steady downstream/laggy upstream connection profile. Even so, the upstream would not be so laggy as to not update the player's position even once as he traversed literally across the map. And with constant latency of the sort you're describing, the lagger would not be able to land those shotgun shots because he'd be seeing a past version of the player and not his true position.

Why would you think this was not cheating? The top scorer in the game is registering to his targets as if he's not just far away, but actually behind two buildings from where he just shotgunned a person to death. And in the shooter's video, everything looks normal, except all three of his shotgun blasts register at the exact same time (another hallmark of upstream lag catch-up in Destiny).