Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

lolesports.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 160 posts

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#31

Post by [deleted] »

jedberg wrote: post #20
axg11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a complex solution. Sometimes a dumb solution that works good enough is better than a complex solution that _probably_ can't be exploited.

It's complex on one end to reduce complexity on the other -- the trading companies wouldn't have to worry about millisecond optimizations if they trading batches were 200ms windows. So the wire lengths wouldn't matter but also not mattering is the processor, memory, software, etc. for the trading companies. Seems like a good tradeoff. And honestly the wire thing probably isn't real. Light moves 30cm in a nanosecond.…

[deleted]

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#33

Post by RheingoldRiver »

colinmhayes wrote: post #32
tester756 wrote: post #12

I still don't understand they didn't let anyone proficient at LoL even try using it?

The difference was .01 seconds. It's not immediately obvious that there is a problem.

It was immediately obvious to competitors and reported on day 1 of competition.

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#34

Post by teen »

jedberg wrote: post #11
gareth_untether wrote: post #2

Reminds me of the cable lengths for black boxes connected to the network in Wall Street. Each cable is the same length regardless of which computer is closer to the access point.

I never understood why they didn't use randomized length micro batches to solve this. Instead of processing orders instantly, wait between 200ms and 500ms and then process all orders that came in that window in random order. Then being 5ms closer to the server wouldn't matter.

That's the same problem, you're just trying to get into the earliest window

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#35

Post by JamesSwift »

jedberg wrote: post #20
axg11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a complex solution. Sometimes a dumb solution that works good enough is better than a complex solution that _probably_ can't be exploited.

It's complex on one end to reduce complexity on the other -- the trading companies wouldn't have to worry about millisecond optimizations if they trading batches were 200ms windows. So the wire lengths wouldn't matter but also not mattering is the processor, memory, software, etc. for the trading companies. Seems like a good tradeoff. And honestly the wire thing probably isn't real. Light moves 30cm in a nanosecond.…

I think it just moves the goal post of the problem. If I now have a 200ms window, then I need to optimize for that 200ms cutoff. I want to do as much work as possible while _still reaching the cutoff_ and so minimization of "non work" still matters. Not only that, but now you incentivize filling up that 200ms with 200ms of analysis.

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#36

Post by holmium »

whateveracct wrote: post #9

A good software lesson here. They built a complex system to tweak tens of ms (at most) of ping to equalize. And they had a bug and it disadvantaged on team. Thus, they have to replay due to unfairness introduced by Riot itself. They could've gone Option 1 - all teams at their natural ping. While it wouldn't be as perfect in theory, it wouldn't have resulted in replaying matches. Plenty of other esports and fighting g…

> People play Melee with ping differences bigger than that and it works fine lol. Waaay more technical game shows that there's tolerance.

I dunno; I'd imagine people would be mad if there was a 15ms ping differential in Melee. I think the online/netplay tournament results are already looked at different than offline, console results.

Moreover, I'm pretty sure that you can't have a differential ping in a P2P game with rollback, so the competitive issues are different between the two scenes. I understand Riot wanting to equalize them. In Melee specifically, I think that the players have to decide on a common frame delay to play, right? If so, then the Melee community has come to the same solution for competitive netplay as Riot has.

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#37

Post by joebob42 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #32
tester756 wrote: post #12

I still don't understand they didn't let anyone proficient at LoL even try using it?

The difference was .01 seconds. It's not immediately obvious that there is a problem.

I suck at lol, the amount of ping it takes for me to be able to tell it's different is only like 30-40 ms. Pro players being able to tell and care at half that seems pretty likely.

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#38

Post by bobogei81123 »

jannyfer wrote: post #4

The part I was interested about the most was glossed over. In what situation can this happen? > we realized that there was a calculation error that only manifested in scenarios where the actual ping was significantly lower than the target latency. In this situation the actual latency would be considerably higher than what is displayed on the overlay on the player's screens.

My guess is that they did not add in the client delay.

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#39

Post by darkwizard42 »

whateveracct wrote: post #9

A good software lesson here. They built a complex system to tweak tens of ms (at most) of ping to equalize. And they had a bug and it disadvantaged on team. Thus, they have to replay due to unfairness introduced by Riot itself. They could've gone Option 1 - all teams at their natural ping. While it wouldn't be as perfect in theory, it wouldn't have resulted in replaying matches. Plenty of other esports and fighting g…

I think you are completely incorrect when you say that a 5-15ms ping advantage doesn't cause a massive effect in a game of LoL. Even the greatest player of the game (Faker) mentioned the difference between "35"ms and the near 0 that Korean players are used to playing.

Low ping is part of players' muscle memory in how they react to visual signals. Changing that slightly creates a big difference, especially in the early and mid game where the outplays are less strategic and can often be more mechanical.

Even in later game teamfighting, the familiarity with latency between key/mouse input and actual in-game movement is mechanically intense (ex. auto-spacing in a close teamfight)

Re: Riot Games: Artificial Latency for Remote Competitors

#40

Post by DixieDev »

whateveracct wrote: post #9

A good software lesson here. They built a complex system to tweak tens of ms (at most) of ping to equalize. And they had a bug and it disadvantaged on team. Thus, they have to replay due to unfairness introduced by Riot itself. They could've gone Option 1 - all teams at their natural ping. While it wouldn't be as perfect in theory, it wouldn't have resulted in replaying matches. Plenty of other esports and fighting g…

This shouldn't detract too much from your point, but for fighting games the situation is slightly different from most other genres:

Modern fighting games, as well as older ones that have been modded to included this (such as Melee), have a netcode model called "rollback" that can negate network-induced latency on local inputs. The trade-off is that what you see is usually inaccurate until you receive inputs from the remote player's machine.

Despite fighters often requiring fast reaction speeds, this downside is not a big deal granted that the ping is low. The first few frames of many actions are generally quite subtle, enough that they are quite hard to distinguish from each other; it's usually specific keyframes/poses that people will actually be reacting to.

Melee is probably hurt the most though, as movement is extremely fast and very important, and the difference between wavedashing left or right is not masked by subtle animations.

Post reply on HN