Well I test my ping with Pingtest(so I know it's not my isp not screwing up). I play ranked the server switches every time(sure it can be the same depending on luck). There have been days where lag has been persistent the whole day. That includes me lagging, but my whole team as well and we all live in different area's(still in the same country though). Sure we could be connected to servers outside our region, but that too would be a failing on Epic's part. When I complain about lag it isn't because of single game, it's because it's because of consistently getting laggy matches(unless one of us happens to get host).
A partly dedicated system is just odd, to say the least. The P2P experience simply isn't smooth enough. You can explain the lag all you want, but at the end of the day the lag is there(at times, dedi's seem to have good uptime these days) and people do have the right to complain about that. Of the online games I play, Gears is the only one where I have lag issue's(on certain days).
Well you're aware of the ways of the internet, so that's cool with me. What gets me is the people who say they have XXMb connection, so that "can't possibly be the problem".
Gears is a close quarters game, where one player directly affect another, and that's shit for networking. Lag isn't created by a game, it's created by the network and compensated by the game. All games are affected by lag in slightly different ways, due to their design, so you can't really compare them. I guess that either Gears netcode is more delicate than the other games you play, or the design of those other games lends itself better to play via the internet. Or, it could be that Gears matchmaking pairs us up badly and that's introducing the lag... Who the fuck knows!? I'm not saying you're not seeing it, I'm just saying there will be a reason for it, and it may not be the actual game, but something dirty *around* the game. If it was the game, then we'd never get good games, but we do... So I suspect the matchmaking, or the dedis.
FWIW, we've made racing games where, if you see two sessions next to each other, in certain circumstances, both players can be in the lead. However, if you're only watching your screen, you'd never know! And this happened with a directly connected arcade network! Two computers running two slightly different simulations are always going to compute different results. Add the Internet... and you've got a randomly latent pile of shit to piece together...
None of this is an attack on anyone, or is it a statement that I am right and everybody else is wrong. In my opinion we're lucky to have the illusion of control that we have in games right now. Networked SFIV is an actual miracle to me! I really don't get it. I can play UK vs US and it plays fine...! How...?
Oh, and as for the people on the Epic boards who change their DNS server and report better gameplay... do you think the game resolves domains for every movement, for every shot...!? You could sell placebo tablets to these people, there's a market...
