InSim Lag Kick

[Tommer]

Hi all,

A lot of people are going to frown at the suggestion of automatically kicking laggers, but hear me out on this one..

I feel that it is largely an unfair effect on gameplay, like a .VOB mod - Lagging suspects are near impossible to catch, just as much as lagging cops to evade, since they cause huge amounts of damadge to touch from the amount of jumping around there car does.

Obviously, there should be some leeway as from time to time there are server lag spikes or little lagspikes that a player may have that aren't the end of the world.

My suggestion is a kind of lag detection system, that kicks people who continue to lag for more than say a minute or so, since it's an unfair gameplay advantage on other players, that can have the same effect as .VOB mods and in my experience I've not found many laggers actually take action when you've told them they're lagging, most of them suddenly don't know how to speak english like they did five minutes ago .

[Malibu]

May be caused by distance, which would make it discrimination.

[ZsoLT]

+1

msg2short

[◄Chuck►]

"Lagging" is a wide term. People with more than 0.20 already affect the gameplay negatively but Insim cannot detect it. Though there is a "lagging" flag reported by lfs, (afaik) it does only show whether a player is "invisible" (Elmo might know more). Which is also bad, but that technique would only catch the top 5% of the laggers.
Frankly, if it was up to me, I would let nobody even join the server with ping >0.10, but I have no tool to detect, nor to enforce it.

[[TC]»Elmo«]

(2012-01-24 13:49)Chuck Wrote:  Though there is a "lagging" flag reported by lfs, (afaik) it does only show whether a player is "invisible".

Correct - my client InSim already reports it. It's basically set whenever someone is lagging enough to show the "Lag X.Xs" and make the car invisible. I believe there are some other occasions where it is set as well - probably due to missing/late non-position packets. However, I don't know what happens when the server itself is lagging as that's somewhat harder to test for.

The tricky part is to make sure the kick isn't too sensitive - it's quite common for the odd packet to go missing (it is UDP after all) so we only want to kick for genuine problems.

[[TC]»Pete«]

Also remember that when you tab out of game, you get about a second of lag. I'm no sure if that's reported as somethig else.

[Johan.]

But, can't a 'code' see how long the person is invisible? Because, your already lagging pretty badly when you get invisible for just a milisecond. (If i'm right, your going jumpy to every direction before you go invisible, right?)

Can't it determine the lagg on how long the invisible person is invisible? I.e. a 2 seconds invisibility time, against a 25 second invisibility time.

[bullet]

Against it. Imagine the flood of newbies raging at the forums because they have no clue why they got kicked. Or if you're at a km run and having a break browsing YouTube or something.
Also, what about a manual-lag-kick, wich we even have already. Not everything has to be automated.
In my oppionion, if it is such a big deal, the admins should just look more for laggers. Now I'm not talking about spectating every player. When they're cruising along and see someone lagging, they can point him out to fix his lag. Many admins already do that already.
So keep it as it is imo.

[[TC] Stephen]

You can't exclude people who can't fix their lag, that's totally unfair.

[Nitros]

(2012-01-26 19:08)Stephen Wrote:  You can't exclude people who can't fix their lag, that's totally unfair.

Personally, I don't mind if people are lagging a bit on the servers. But if they are in a chase, then its not acceptable for them to be lagging.
If people know they have a bad connection, they should stay out of chases. If their lag starts affecting others' gameplay, then they have to go.

I understand some people can't 'fix' their 'lag' - but if its between them suffering because of it, or everyone else suffering because of it - we have to go with the majority.

Say someone is blind, its not their fault - it doesn't seem right to penalise them for it. But they can't be allowed to drive a car, because its not fair to everyone else.

[[TC]»Pete«]

It's easy enough to find people who are lagging and sort it out, so in fairness, this entire system isn't needed.

We've been dealing with laggers for 6 years, we can handle it for 6 more

[[RDSR] Roba]

I think the same, the system is not necessary.

Admins are able to deal with the worst laggers who keep getting in chase or so.

[Clockwork]

I quite like the idea. If you're lagging then you (in the majority of cases) can fix it. If you're far away from the server - yes it should make your ping higher, but as long as its consistent then it's generally fine.

It's when your ping starts jumping like a yoyo being very inconsistent it becomes a problem - and that isn't necessarily caused by distance, it's caused by being on shockingly bad networks.

[[TC]»Elmo«]

Indeed.
Nowhere in the world is far away enough for distance alone to trigger the lag flag - you'd have to be routed from, say, the UK to the server (in Germany) via Australia for that to happen.

If the lag flag is regularly being tripped, it's either because you (or your ISP) are overloading the connection, or something, somewhere, is misconfigured or broken. In 99% of cases the problem can either be directly solved by the player or it goes away after a few hours.


Regarding how it actually works, the lag flag is part of the MCI packet, which is sent to the InSim at regular intervals (a few times a second in our case iirc). This means that we can't measure precisely how long someone's been lagging, but we can get rough idea of how long an isolated lag spell lasts (ie when someone alt-tabs) and whether the lag is happening regularly (bad connection).

(2012-01-26 15:43)bullet Wrote:  Imagine the flood of newbies raging at the forums because they have no clue why they got kicked.

People already get a message as to why they're being kicked right before the command is actually issued, so no problem there.

(2012-01-26 15:43)bullet Wrote:  Or if you're at a km run and having a break browsing YouTube or something.

If your browsing of YouTube is causing you to lag significantly (which does have a knock-on impact to the overall latency quality of the entire server) then I have no sympathy.

[Knight]

Well if this applied. Cya TC, ill never be able to get on.

[ChrisM]

(2012-01-26 19:27)Nitros Wrote:  

(2012-01-26 19:08)Stephen Wrote:  You can't exclude people who can't fix their lag, that's totally unfair.

...If people know they have a bad connection, they should stay out of chases. If their lag starts affecting others' gameplay, then they have to go.

I understand some people can't 'fix' their 'lag' - but if its between them suffering because of it, or everyone else suffering because of it - we have to go with the majority...

Exactly that. And as Knight said, also.

[FR4NOx]

What's wrong with how it is currently?

[bullet]

(2012-01-26 21:10)Elmo Wrote:  

(2012-01-26 15:43)bullet Wrote:  Or if you're at a km run and having a break browsing YouTube or something.

If your browsing of YouTube is causing you to lag significantly (which does have a knock-on impact to the overall latency quality of the entire server) then I have no sympathy.

I'm not doing myself as my wireless is crappy enough already. Was only an example.

[Boosted13B]

As another point, there are people like me, that can only get internet service from their Cell Phone Carrier, yes its slow, yes it may lag, but I am very careful when I drive and an=m aware of it, if I crash some1 I always do the !sorry command. I guess the point I'm trying to say is that just because we lag doesn't mean that we are dangerous to everyone. I pull over when I'm being chased to prevent causing anyone (such as the officer or myself) from being thrown OOB. So, as a final note, target the laggy players that are causing problems, not everyone.

So, Obviously -1 from me, would be that way even if I did have great internet.

OK, looking through the other posts this point was kinda already made, but it's activity on the forums for me :shrug:

[Kieran]

i think it would be a good idea to have a message come up and tell you you're lagging, like some other servers do!