Multiplayer Ping

Asterix · May 31, 2019

What's with the average ping being around 200ms? Had a brief foray last night and gave up after a few tries as the servers were undrivable with cars pinging all over the place, mainly into me.

In AC servers I'm around 25-50ms for the EU hosted servers.

I note that the RD hosted club race server is around 60ish, and the Competition server is around 80ms.

I have a fast and usually clean home internet connection.

Neilski · May 31, 2019

I often see ping times over 400 in the server list, but then when I hit refresh a few times they usually (not always) get dramatically smaller. In the actual races it's almost always fine, so probably less than 150 for most people (disregarding the measured pings, though they do generally look small too).
My experience is different to yours, clearly. The server list ping system seems to be faulty but you are having your problems only once you're on the servers, yeah?

Asterix · May 31, 2019

Video as example.

So, see a server I want to join in the general lobby, ping of 200ms+. Search for that same server at the top - same server comes back at 55ms. Join. Others in game show similar pings - the reality is different and you can't race.

Searching for specific servers does seem to bring lower pings but the in-game experience is still rubbish.

Neilski · May 31, 2019

Asterix said:
Video as example.

So, see a server I want to join in the general lobby, ping of 200ms+. Search for that same server at the top - same server comes back at 55ms. Join. Others in game show similar pings - the reality is different and you can't race.

Searching for specific servers does seem to bring lower pings but the in-game experience is still rubbish.

Wow, that video is pretty extreme. I interpret those antics as bad packet loss, not merely a few hundred milliseconds of ping. Looks like more than a second's worth of lost updates at times, e.g around 2:01 (closer to 2 seconds there I think), which is just beyond nuts. Given the time of day I wouldn't have expected the ACC servers to be overloaded - was that a Kunos server you were on?

The other cars are doing things in harmony so I guess it's not the links between the individuals and the server, but somehow the packets from the server to you are getting delayed/dropped (delayed is as good as dropped for time-sensitive position updates tho, and ACC maybe just ignores packets which are very late). I guess ACC doesn't use peer to peer updates?

Are you certain that your ISP isn't doing any traffic management? Bit of a long shot, but it can cause serious problems - I had to change ISP several years ago when they tried and failed to cure packet delay/loss issues caused by their management systems which destroyed LFS for me. I have no clue though if the ACC multiplayer network traffic is qualitatively different from AC (which is fine for you, right? no packet loss episodes when in servers?).

Damn, this reply got waaay too long and rambly

tl;dr: if any ACC servers are consistently "perfect" for you, then the traffic management explanation is probably not the answer. If none are ever perfect, then maybe capture some packets with Wireshark and see if you can learn anything about whether the packets are late or just missing.