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Connection bars ≠ lag

YagaminYagamin
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edited April 24, 2018 in General Discussion
So what exactly do the bars represent? The answer is not as obvious as it seems.

I am from Aus and joining US boats gives me 1-2 blue bars and unless the host is a potato and everyone lags, I generally get no lag at all. I can do the hooks in Abomination just fine, and I can even do Neam without any deaths fairly consistently; 2 deaths in the last 12 runs.

However, I know a few Aus hosts who give me 4-5 blue bars but lags (rubber banding type) even if it's a duo run.

And I also have experienced a few runs where the whole party was on 1 red bar the entire time but didn't lag at all.

So from what I experience, lag does not always correlate to bars, hence bars is not ping and color is not latency, so what do they actually represent?

And in case it matters, my graphics settings is on custom; model, shader, lighting and texture are high; shadow, animation, physics, particles are low; streaming, multicore enabled; the rest disabled.
  1. Do bars always correlate to lag for you?15 votes
    1. Yes, I never lag if I have 5 bars and lag always increases as bars decrease.
       47% (7 votes)
    2. No, I sometimes experience lag with 5 bars and sometimes no lag with 1 bar.
       47% (7 votes)
    3. No, I sometimes experience lag with 5 bars and always lag with 1 bar.
       7% (1 vote)

Comments

  • RhapsodyOfFireRhapsodyOfFire
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    edited April 24, 2018
    I guess that bar represents the delivery rate relative to the server's or for example google.com and it's likely measured by pinging or sending test packets to the host occasionally or accumulating the delivery times of those packets that require a response. So if you have frequent lag spikes with the host it may show a full bar most of the times because it always takes the average of the previous delivery times.

    The red color could indicate a delayed bar refreshing or something like that because it's usually just blue and red and nothing else.

    But this is just my theory.
  • BabyDaniBabyDani
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    i dunno much about it +shy.... but multi-processing is on by default and working very very well these days. (for about the last year maybe)
    i've been in boats where the host had only two bars, and i've had no lag.

    maybe it's time to merge eu and na... and open the game up to south/central america and the philippines +fight

    bienvenidos and mabuhay <3
  • EmerthystEmerthyst
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    the bars usually represent to me the ping or distance to travel for the signal and that is a good indicator if you are gonna lag but its the not the same type of lag as slideshows. Usually it forces me to do movements earlier or dodge earlier to give time for the action to register. What actually is a good measure if you're lagging is if you see rainbow(flicking green/red) bars or the bars don't stay consistently at a certain level because that will lead to slideshows and missed attacking frames.
  • boddoleboddole
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    As I've said to other people in game before, the only thing worse than '2 bars' is 5 bars...Any 'issues' that I encounter for other bar levels (rubber-banding, stuttering/freezes, wonky registration of impact times) are always the worst at 5 full bars (if they occur), for whatever sense that makes. Makes me wonder if when the system has trouble it just defaults to full bars.
  • MisterWhiskersMisterWhiskers
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    edited April 25, 2018
    probably just you

    for me it's always been

    2 bars = extreme lag
    3 bars = playable with some lag spikes
    4-5 bars = super smooth

    if you lag at 4-5 bars its most likely your own internet connection acting up
  • EiriEiri
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    probably just you

    for me it's always been

    2 bars = extreme lag
    3 bars = playable with some lag spikes
    4-5 bars = super smooth

    if you lag at 4-5 bars its most likely your own internet connection acting up

    Same as this. And performance can affect your bars as i have seen so you can have low lag but low fps and your bars wont be 5-4
  • JinyieJinyie
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    Could be hardware. I have a laptop that I sometimes play Vindi on, but it stutters every so often for a good 2 seconds. When I see 5 bar I know that the host lives near me lul. From personal experience never had a laggy 5 bar connection or one that I remember was noticeably horrible.
  • MochiSweetMochiSweet
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    edited April 26, 2018
    As an eternally 1-2 bar player i can tell you less bar = more delay, 2 bars is barely playable but not that smooth in comparison to 5 bars. Dodging neam gate is the best example to prove this, at lower bars means higher delay you have to start moving a bit sooner than 5 bars for not getting hit.
    And 1 bar is abysmal.
    Also not to mention as an arisha player lag can affect your skills ( warp doesnt teleport you to proper position, warping stops midway, resonance fails to cast despite animation still activated, rb doesn't work properly... etc )
    Yagamin
  • noctrednoctred
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    edited April 26, 2018
    My guess is that the number of bars relates to latency (packet travel time) while the color of the bars relates to quality (packet loss, packet filtering, and other service quality indicators). You might equate this to cellular and WiFi signal strength (RSSI) and signal/noise ratio (SINR) - full bars (high RSSI) with a very low SINR will result in poor service, as will low RSSI with a high SINR. Both signal strength and quality are needed.

    The above reflects my own experience. Whenever I have 1 bar, my inputs are always noticeably delayed (high latency) but the gameplay generally remains smooth and predictable (no loss). On the other hand, sometimes I have 4 or 5 bars and rubberband all over the place with highly unpredictable character movement (signs of probable loss or general circuit quality issues, irrespective of latency).

    Hope that helps.
    Yagamin
  • RhapsodyOfFireRhapsodyOfFire
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    edited April 26, 2018
    We can only guess but no one will really know how that works except DevCat.

    Being positive and thinking they do the measurements for the bars with test tcp packets and not icmp (ping) packets it should show the exact performance of the host. So one thing that remains is the minor frequent performance fluctuations (lag spikes) before the bars get updated or they are accidentally updated between the lag spikes (because lag spikes can be evenly repeating too), so you see it as if it was a full bar. Also if the packets are handled in thread pools that will make it even more complicated.

    It doesn't happen so often and for long, so the bars more or less work fine.

    You can also rubberband on 5 bars because it's not just the network delivery times that counts but also the host's and your machine's load that constantly fluctuates depending on player activity and countless other things, like the game's internal process threads that are waiting for each other or they are near deadlock/livelock situations. The latters are common slowing factors in multi-threaded games. They (or at least the deadlocks) show no sign of cpu load because they do the opposite of that. A livelock can consume the cpu but it depends on the implementation. And it's a pain in the a** to find out where they come from. And they are usually difficult to reproduce.