The Curse of High Latency

I've just uninstalled APB tonight.

Mostly in nerdrage frustration from getting pwned one too many times by opposing players.

I did figure out before I left, how to display one's ping. I had about 350-400ms.

Now I don't know whether you call that unplayable or not. One man's unplayable is decent in the eye of another beholder. I've had 500-800ms in WoW and Aion and still managed to survive and have a reasonable amount of fun. I've also found 300ms the breaking point limit in FPSes like Team Fortress and so on.

I did know that I was getting pincushioned full of holes by much higher ranked players wielding much faster firing SMGs, sometimes wandering around in groups, and mown down by folks who could mysteriously operate the vehicles more adroitly than my steering of the metal bricks, and the only time I had some success was against another total noob like me who let me shoot him a couple of times from far away before he realised I was there.

Part of the frustration is that I don't know if I should chalk it up to lag or lack of skill. Possibly both, the one not helping the other any.

Problem is, if one lags on a constant basis, one is rarely able to learn to improve either. So the frustration comes from not-knowing. If it's lag, then I should forget the game. If it's lack of skill, then I should stick it out a while longer to see if I improve. Both logical solutions are diametrically opposed, and I end up teetering on a see-saw of "aargh."

I have a feeling it's 40% lag, 30% the MMO higher leveled syndrome and 30% my sheer noobiness.

The latter two are not going to improve if the lag is a factor, which is why the game is off the hard disk, but I just get grumpy thinking about the fact that 'player skill' is as much lucky geographical proximity as speedy reactions and practice.

Ten or so years ago, I started to figure this out when I realized I wasn't moving or murdering as fast on Geandakin the thief in the MUD arena when I was back home in Singapore as opposed to sitting on a high-speed college connection in the US way closer to Toronto, Canada.

And it was somewhat of a nuisance because it was hard to keep up an invincible reputation when you can't move as fast as you normally would have.

Then there was the college year when I spent a good 75% of my waking hours playing Team Fortress Classic on a laptop - which wouldn't be the first machine of choice to produce decent framerates - but had a 40-83 ms ping to some really nice community servers. To the point that I was getting decently good as a soldier class on Hunted, annoyingly awesome as an engineer on any other map, and my handle was recognizable as a regular player who wasn't last on the leaderboard, but hovered between the number 2 to middle of the range mark.

Then I went home on vacation break and realized all my favorite servers were now verboten because I could barely see shit and react to anything before getting blown to pieces with a 330ms ping. Instead I got stuck with the Starhub servers and pre-adolescent Singaporean/Malaysian guys.

Same sad story with Natural Selection by the way, though I managed to find some semi-decent Aussie/New Zealand servers for a time.

It's sad. Annoying. Frustrating.

I guess I'm doomed to playing games where latency doesn't matter. Such as point-and-click ATITD where player reaction times are measured in the days and weeks and months instead of milliseconds.