Rito pls: View ping of teammates

Fegone·May 12, 2015·6 votes·1,993 views

I get why it's not a good idea to add everyone's ping to the stats screen: "Oh look, the enemy top laner has a constant ping of over 500, let's gank him non stop".

But I don't see a reason why not show the ping to your team mates. In my opinion, this would make people act more understanding. If you have a constant high ping, people will know you didn't just afk or leave, people will know you are not rage-quitting. And people will understand that your reaction time might not be as fast as they expect when they gank, if your ping is over 1000.

Anyone has any objections to that, or anything that could be considered a downside of showing your teammates' pings?

8 Comments

Maple CrusaderMay 12, 20152 votes

Aside from the possibility that teammates with bad connections get ousted, at least it would be understandable when you can see that your teammates are unintentionally disconnected or is actually lagging.

Ice Weasel XMay 12, 20151 votes

{quoted}

I get why it's not a good idea to add everyone's ping to the stats screen: "Oh look, the enemy top laner has a constant ping of over 500, let's gank him non stop".

But I don't see a reason why not show the ping to your team mates. In my opinion, this would make people act more understanding. If you have a constant high ping, people will know you didn't just afk or leave, people will know you are not rage-quitting. And people will understand that your reaction time might not be as fast as they expect when they gank, if your ping is over 1000.

Anyone has any objections to that, or anything that could be considered a downside of showing your teammates' pings?

Some people have a bias about certain ping values. "Teammates above 70ms ping? THEIR LAG COST US THE GAME." 70 isn't even bad.

Having your teammates' pings visible also means there's more data being transmitted to everyone. For realtime interactions, you generally want to cut down on superfluous data. The ping data itself may be tiny, but it's not the only data already transmitting. The impact on connections would depend partially on polling rates, obviously. Too infrequent and you're not going to realize when your teammate has a latency spike. Too frequent and you're just bloating your transmission.

Ping also isn't everything. Some people are still playing on low bandwidth connections. They can have excellent latency values, but horrible throughput. A dialup connection can achieve ping values as low as a dedicated OC-12, but will have a noticeably worse experience playing games with realtime communications.

NilokMay 12, 20151 votes

Those people will always blame something, if not their team's ping, then they play, build, wards, or something else. I find that a hollow reason since they will just change the focus of the blame, not stop blaming.

I believe he was referring to how, early on for League of Legends, you could see everyone's ping during the loading screen. He is suggesting adding that back in, but only for your own team. This would not cause any increased lag in game.

Ice Weasel XMay 12, 20151 votes

{quoted}

Those people will always blame something, if not their team's ping, then they play, build, wards, or something else. I find that a hollow reason since they will just change the focus of the blame, not stop blaming.

I believe he was referring to how, early on for League of Legends, you could see everyone's ping during the loading screen. He is suggesting adding that back in, but only for your own team. This would not cause any increased lag in game.

They took it out for a reason, and that reason is very likely optimization. He's asking for it during the game, not the loading screen.

Realtime value reporting like that causes issues in itself, such as the decision of how to handle a teammate who has a lag spike. Wait for the ping to complete before sending the message? That ends up turning updates into individual reports instead of single updates with your teammates' current values simultaneously. Don't wait for the ping to complete before sending the message? Then do you send the last known value or display an "unknown" placeholder until the next known instance occurs?

FegoneMay 12, 20152 votes

This is not an issue at all. As someone who works in the software engineering industry, I can tell you it would not add any significant overhead to what data you're sending and receiving. In a simple scenario, it's the same value you see yourself while having a lag spike: Sometimes it stops at 500, sometimes it goes to 9000. Distributing this value among your team mates periodically every second won't impact the performance at all. You autoattacking something every second causes a larger overhead than sending 1 integer value.

FegoneMay 12, 20151 votes

Intervals of 1 second are not going to have an impact on your game performance whatsoever. Those few bytes you're sending are nothing compared to what's already transmitted between you, the server, and other team mates. So that's not really an issue at all.

The only thing I agree on is the bandwidth vs latency issue, and I'm not sure whether it should get addressed or not, but I think in general it should be sufficient and the latency can be neglected. There will be some occasions where you could say it would be inaccurate, but as in all games where pings are shown (like most First Person Shooters), it's sufficient for gameplay to show the ping only.