The map dropping thread didn't generate enough drama for my taste, so let's give this a try.
If you want to discuss ping rules in other gametypes than duel, create another thread.
I am NOT an admin in Ownage or any other tournament.

Why

So, what I would like to see is a ping/server rule that fulfills the following:

1) Given the rule and the players, it must clear what should be done.

When the ping rule isn't totally clear it leads to a lot bad situations. Players will fight for their right to the better ping and will get angry at each other. Sadly also the more stubborn and more vicious player will eventually secure that advantage.

When the rule is clear, people might still think that the situation is unfair. But they have known the rule from day 1, it's the same against all the players and they can only get angry at rules/admins. Most importantly being an asshole will no longer secure you an advantage.

2) Be as fair as possible, while still following rule 1

The word "fair", is what makes this hard. There is simply no consensus what fair pings are, or whether such thing even exists.

Some people think that people who are more accustomed to playing with higher ping, should be forced to play with a higher ping than their opponent. I don't really agree with this. Plus even if I did, I don't see how it could measured in an objective way so that rule 1 could be fulfilled.

So in my opinion the fairest thing possible, is to just give both players equal conditions and see how they can perform.

The Rule

Find a server where the higher one of both players' ping is as low as possible. (Using proxies if necessary.) The player that has lower ping, will set his cl_delay_packet value so that both players have equal ping on the scoreboard.

Exceptions:
Ping only has to be increased up to 52 ms using cl_delay_packet, even if the other player's ping is higher.
European server must be used, unless both players are located outside of Europe.
If either player has packet loss on a specific server, that server should never be selected.
If a player has an unstable ping it will be considered to be same as the lowest value it reaches.

Given the large amount of currently active polish players, and the historic scandinavian animosity towards them with regards to ping, this aspect of the rules becomes extremely important for this tournament.

I don't really think a rule being fair is something to consider, it should be simple, clear and resolve the situation without demanding admins.
An example I would like to try is:

The match will be played on the server where both players have as low ping as possible out of those listed below.
The lower pinging player will ping up to the same as the other.
If either player has packet loss on a specific server, that server should never be selected.
If a player has an unstable ping it will be considered to be same as the lowest value it reaches.

Servers:
clanwars.xs4all.nl
pangela.se
(and some random good servers)

A problem is obviously that conditions can be pretty bad and it would discourage new servers, but it would be damn simple.


The notion of having a maximum to ping up to is silly I think. If we can ping up then just do it.
Also limiting servers to European only is like destroying the chance for ever having an American scene, no matter how small that chance is.

The rule you suggest I could consider with some edits:
Find a server where the highest ping of any player is as low as possible, using proxies. The lower pinging player will ping up to the other players ping.

Exceptions:
If either player has packet loss on a specific server, that server should never be selected.
If a player has an unstable ping it will be considered to be same as the lowest value it reaches.

Generally not a good idea these days.

Reason for this is cl_earlypackets, you can't determine how the player's ping actually is, other than it's lower than the value displayed on scoreboard. A player with 25ms ping in scoreboard could be playing with 13ms or 16ms (or whatever lower than 25ms) ping with earlypackets, so if the other player has 12ms it is still more or less even situation.

I'm not going into specifics as you can read the information required from the article I gave the url to. Basically games like 12ms vs 25ms, 25ms vs 38ms and so on can be acceptable, while pings like 12ms vs 38ms, 25ms vs 51ms, 38ms vs 64ms probably won't be.

It's up to the admins and players to understand what's going on and decide some new ping rules. The old way isn't acceptable anymore, especially if you are checking pings from the scoreboard.

I am aware of this. But unfortunately the scoreboard ping is the only information that is available for everyone, so we have to make due with it.

By forcing people to play with equal scoreboard ping, you make sure that the biggest possible difference is 12 ms, which isn't perfect but it's acceptable.

If there would be a way to know the exact ping of your opponent, then I would propose using cl_delay_packet to set exactly that ping of course.

Edit: If you use cl_delay_packet to raise your ping, so that it's the same as your opponents on the scoreboard. The real pings will of course become closer to each other as well, even if you still have an advantage. So if you have 5ms somewhere and your opponent has 15ms, you will have to ping up to 13 (or is it 14) ms to get the same scoreboard ping.

I think Medar's proposition is good, the only question is can you verify that the other person is in fact using a proxy, not just claiming to do so? Otherwise it might be possible to force higher ping to the game that would really be necessary. The person who is required to ping up should have a right to ask the other one to try another server / proxy.

Great idea, and the way it should be to make it as fair as possible.

edit: and yeah, the rules should at least be made REALLY clear about this issue so at least you know what you sign up for.

also, players should be forced to have an updated entry in johnnys pingDB (prior to tournament starting). If no such entry exist, their opponent is free to select whatever server they want (localhost). I know the pingdb doesnt take into account fwd/qizmos (can that be fixed with ezquake autorouting thingy btw?), but at least it is something to start with.

I can understand that some random rookie doesnt know about which servers he has good ping etc.. But when I have to spend 30mins to try and figure out at what servers some polish dude has 39ms or less, a somewhat accurate pingdb entry would be a good start...

Would that be mandatory, or only if the high pinging player request it?

Because I don't mind that people have a lower ping than me. I have roughly 26ms in most of Europe, if I'm gonna play vs a swede in dk and he has 13ms, I'm not gonna ask him to "ping up". I see two reasons not to, the first being that he is used to playing with that ping and I'm used to playing with my 26.

However if I'm gonna play in a country where I ping 39ms and my opponent ping 13, and it's the only option as he has bad routing out of his country. Then I consider it fair to play on even pings, as I lose my usual conditions. But as long as I get my usual conditions, I see no reason to cripple my opponent - Just because i can!

totally agree with zalon. Anyway this delapacket suxx, i dont have a 160 hz monitor, so please set it to 75hz...thanx

I would prefer the use of equal pings to be mandatory. Big goal with having a clear rule is to get rid of all the whine. If it's optional people will feel like the other guy is an asshole when he requests you to ping up. Plus people shouldn't have to choose between being a nice guy and getting the best chance to win the game.

I also wouldn't mind if playing with equal pings would become standard outside of tournaments as well, since cl_delay_packet was added there usually is no reason to play with unequal conditions. You think of it as crippling your opponent, but I find that quite weird. To me it's more like making the game fair and thus more fun. (I always ping up when playing duels, if I remember.)

The thing is that with problematic games you almost always need to use some kind of proxy for someone, so pingdb is not really worth the effort.

Exactly. It should become fully automatic thing. There are many servers where player 1 pings 13 ms, many servers where the other one pings 13 ms and maybe there's not a single server where both ping 26 or 39. So you join, you check you have 26, opponent has 39, so you automatically increase it to 39 (which still may in reality be 27 vs 39 due to early packets, but at least there is a guarantee the real difference is not greater than 13 ms). This pretending "I'll just do nothing and maybe he will not ask me to increase" is not too friendly, like if the person is missing some "social intelligence".

Actually it's kinda sad that we need to put this thing in rules, it kinda speaks of some kind of decline in the general morality.

I don't think that marking this as "crippling your opponent" as Zalon did is fair at all. Both players should do their best to make the conditions as fair as possible.


I think the duelmania rules explained it nicely. Player has to show his lowest possible ping on a public server (that is, not on some his "localhost" or his providers subnet or whatever).

Personally I don't like when some player is unable to go below 39 anywhere, not even in his own country, and forces the other player to play with ping 51 ms because of that. Doesn't seem fair to me at all.

The problem with that is the inconsistent nature of qw servers. Depending on what time of the month you ask, I could have either 12ms to an irish server or 29ms to a UK server (39ms on the scoreboard) which goes down 25ms at night. Should I therefore be forced to play with a 40ms disadvantage depending on the time of day and whether or not the irish server is up or down? That doesn't seem very fair at all.

I don't think it's a problem with given QW server, but more like with the route between you and that server maybe.

Anyway, I'm not suggesting some "fascist" rule to measure everyone's ping like that. My point was mostly to emphasize that forcing someone to play on 51 ms (which is sort of 'border' where you start feeling the ping effects badly) does not seem fair to me on the circumstances I described. Maybe I'm alone with that opinion tho.

Also, what about antilag? Could solve this 51 ms vs 51 ms thing.

With regards to the Irish server, I meant that it tends to go down a lot and I have to wait for the admin to put it back up, which sometimes takes weeks. The problem often isn't that someone has a bad conection; It's that, for whatever reason, there is no server up near them.

Maybe you misunderstood my post, but what I said was that I consider 26ms (my usual conditions) vs 13ms (my opponents usual conditions) to be fair.


Then screw the scoreboard ping and make a client side fairpings feature. The clients know the players true ping, let the clients figure out the values for cl_delay_packet.

If noone got time for such a feature, then atleast get a version of ezQuake out with the qwfwd "ping tree/best route" feature, that can be allowed for ownage. Then it should be easier for the players to get closer to equal pings.


I don't consider anything above 39ms for a player who are used to 13ms fair. If we take a player like Mushi, who play like all of his official games (practice games as well?) with a ping above 50, he is used to the high ping. I don't see what is fair in forcing a 13ms player to play 51vs51 against Mushi. As Mushi will get all the benefits, as he doesn't have to adjust in any way. Maybe going no higher than 39vs51 could be justified.

I don't know, I'm no pro and would probably play 51vs26 in Portugal against Mushi to make him happy

That could also be the option, that your map is played on your opponents server, and his map is played on yours (no localhost of course), but I guess that would result in a lot of whine and even more unfair pings.


Are there anyone still working on that?

There are two reasons for doing this (as far as I can see), and I don't agree with either:

1) Because the other player failed to get a proper Internet connection I should get an advantage.

I simply don't like this. Mostly people would have better connection if they only could, but based on where they live it isn't possible. Also if you happen to be the only QW player in some area, should you create a QW server on a nearby server just so you won't have to play with higher ping in tournaments? I would rather see a rule that encourages people from remote locations to play, rather than one that discourages them.

2) The player with higher ping to closest server is more accustomed to playing with higher ping, so it's fair that I get lower ping.

You can't just deduce this from the ping to the closest server. People won't always play on their closest server. People with horrible connections still sometimes play on LAN etc. The player might have had better connection earlier.
Player with the lower ping always has the opportunity to get used to the higher ping prior to the match.
Even if one player plays with 38 ping most of the time and the other plays with 13 ping most of the time, it doesn't mean that something like 64 ms vs. 38 ms is fair at all.

Yep.

Obviously there is no perfect solution, and the fact that one player can be more used to a higher ping, or that his playing style can be better suited for higher ping can't be denied. That said, it is still lesser of two evils and playing with equal pings (with an upper limit perhaps) is the least unfair compromise solution there is.

While this is a valid point I think by the time the tournament gets to the important stages, most people will have a fairly good idea about what sort of pings other players can get.
Most experienced players know their way round qwfwd/qizmo and you know that if some guy has 13ms in finland that he should be able to get at most 52ms in places like holland and germany by using proxies (if they get 26ms in denmark, then probably 39ms in nl/de).

Now obviously in a big duel tourney we will likely see some relative unknown players from 'unusual' countries, making it a bit tougher, but it's not really that big a deal and after a couple of rounds it should be obvious what sort of pings they get to potential servers you might play on.

Also, regarding checking if they are on a proxy or not, you can always do /addserver proxy.ip:port to see if they're connected via it. And yes, if they really wanted to manipulate it they could chain proxies together, and you'd need to scan your whole server list, but to be honest if anyone is that bothered about manipulating their ping to influence server choice then there are probably easier ways of doing it outside of Quake anyway.