Upload speed and online lag?

[strangeinternet]

post-patch I'm still experiencing a hiccup every time someone makes contact with the ball. I ran some speed tests (through ps4 and also online) and have 15mps down but only about 1.1mps upload...Wondering about the speeds other people play with and how they think it relates to smoothness of the online experience?

[HozAndMoose]

Re: Upload speed and online lag?

post-patch I'm still experiencing a hiccup every time someone makes contact with the ball. I ran some speed tests (through ps4 and also online) and have 15mps down but only about 1.1mps upload...Wondering about the speeds other people play with and how they think it relates to smoothness of the online experience?

Ive played two game online vs a friend. There were some weird things that would happen but nothing that made the game un playable or cause me or him to screw up. The speeds that show up in the Connection test on the PS4 will change every time. The one i just did though has me at 161.4 up.

PC test


Clearly my speeds are overkill. But even with them games like BF4 would lag worse than almost any game i have ever played with their ****ty servers in the beginning. Even the best internet cant make up for net code and bad servers. I dont know if The Show uses dedicated servers or P2P. But dedicated should be the goal if they arent using them.

[strangeinternet]

Re: Upload speed and online lag?

whoa those speeds + KC logo, you must have google fiber? Jealous!

You are basically the perfect test case though for figuring out what lag is netcode and what is based on client connections-- especially if you're playing with people you know, whose connections you know... So I think we'd all be very curious to know how your online experience goes if you play more games...

SCEA switched over to dedicated servers two years ago but they totally reworked the netcode this year and that's probably what's causing most people's issues...

[nomo17k]

Re: Upload speed and online lag?

I suppose my connection is pretty standard:




If the hiccup the OP is experiencing is when he is on the pitching side, I think it is just how the online netcode works this year.

Instead of syncing both sides near real-time, all the time, I think this years game syncs at much fewer points during the ball is in play to avoid lags happening on one side to get propagated immediately to the other side. In previous years, that implementation has caused the lags, both intentional and unintentional, to be felt all the time by both sides... which wasn't optimal.

When the contact is made, the game needs to sync both the pitching and batting side to communicate the detail of the quality of contact that the batter has made. If for some reason the pitching side lagged a bit while waiting for that info to be received from the hitting side, a bunch of frames seem to skip right before switching to the fielding screen.

I have experienced that kind of lagging quite a bit, but not consistently.

I play against guys oversea (Dominican Republic, Japan, etc.) all the time, and while I can feel the effects of network lag when my opponent is physically farther away, it doesn't really affect the game that much. There are a few specific people whom I played against that seem to have slow connection and those games lag quite a bit more (which is noticeable in players and balls warping, mostly during baserunning), but because of the new implementation the network lag doesn't affect pitching and hitting that much.

[strangeinternet]

Re: Upload speed and online lag?

Nomo,
Thanks for this breakdown- I think you're right on..the hiccup happens on both sides for me but definitely seems like in trying to solve the perennial lag problem they "took from Peter to pay Paul" as the saying goes-- instead of eliminating lag they just condensed it and pushed it to another part of the playing experience. In my opinion the older ('13) net code was actually preferable- you sometimes got unplayable games and in general everything was a little slower but at least the slowdown was pretty consistent so you adapted, here it's very start and stop and actually more jarring. Hopefully they can iron it out for next year, which seems to be what we always say about online this time of year, unfortunately

[nomo17k]

Re: Upload speed and online lag?

Nomo,
Thanks for this breakdown- I think you're right on..the hiccup happens on both sides for me but definitely seems like in trying to solve the perennial lag problem they "took from Peter to pay Paul" as the saying goes-- instead of eliminating lag they just condensed it and pushed it to another part of the playing experience. In my opinion the older ('13) net code was actually preferable- you sometimes got unplayable games and in general everything was a little slower but at least the slowdown was pretty consistent so you adapted, here it's very start and stop and actually more jarring. Hopefully they can iron it out for next year, which seems to be what we always say about online this time of year, unfortunately

I also thought MLB 13 online was not bad at all, and even though it was more susceptible to lags in general, both major and minor, when you play enough games you learn to adjust. So as you said, I would've been pretty happy if MLB 14 just took the same approach as MLB 13 and improved it a bit incrementally.

That said, I also think the new approach the devs took this year for the most part was not wrong at all, at least conceptually, because we do have a lot smoother experience during the very critical moments of user input, like using Meter/Pulse for pitching and hitting.

Shifting the control of the game where appropriate makes sense, given that the pitcher does not control what the pitch does once it leaves his hand, after which it is up to the hitter. Things get difficult when the ball is in play, since there the fielding and baserunning sides both need real-time feedback and decide what to do... and it's currently not quite right with the animation sync issues that we have on the baserunning side.

Where it really, really failed badly this year was not the new ideas themselves, but that fact that the online part of the game shipped with just too many stability issues. My guess is that the devs didn't really have much time to thoroughly work on the net code this year. They had a new platform that they needed to support in PS4. Things like losing a programmer or two during a project could have also happened... it happens all the time... it's entirely possible the devs simply lacked resources (i.e., mostly time) to bring the online portion to where they actually wanted to.

People complain so much about the stability issues like hard/soft freeze, which is totally understandable. It's disappointing to online guys and I'm sure the devs are similarly disappointed in not being able to deliver quite as good an online product this year, given that there was quite a bit of efforts to improve online gaming with the additional stuff we have this year.

But I actually want to see a lot more honest discussions about how people feel about what the new net code has done to our online gaming experience itself, simply forgetting about all the stability issues (because they just need to be fixed).

Do we prefer close-to-offline experience but with occasional sync issues that we have in MLB 14, or do we prefer MLB 13-type net code, where our overall experience is very much more susceptible to network lags, and the game doesn't quite feel as close to offline, but overall quite a bit more stable because the net code was a bit more mature?

I don't know what other online guys prefer, because all I read are mostly complaints about freezes and stability issues. I think we forget how different this year's online game plays compared to past years. It's worth discussing whether MLB 14 has been an improvement.

I actually prefer MLB 14 online pitching and hitting, but for fielding and baserunning I would probably prefer MLB 13 net code, unless the game totally removes animation sync issues, which haven't gone away.