> A lot of it is what people are used to. When I go to LAN's > and then come back and play online. I can hit anything > for toffee for a few days as I adjust back. In cooperation with a cyber cafe, I made an experiment to see if it was pure placebo effect or there actually was in some degree a difference between low pings, e.g. in the 10 <-> 20 range. The cyber cafe had an FFA server hosted at the caf� LAN, and a lot of discussions had been made to the advantage of playing locally.
So we invited a bunch of high skillers, selected medium skillers and low skillers from the caf� customers and set up our experiment. The high skillers first. Some placed locally with pings around 6 - 10, some placed on high-end pipes in the near vicinity able to ping around 10 - 14, some on lower-end pipes pinging in around 20-25. We used the same setup btw. For medium and low skillers, however there we used lines able to connect at pings only 20-25 and 40 - 60 For the high skillers the result was pretty amazing, but expected by at least some. They were pretty much the same skill, so what gave them an advantage was even slight differences in pings, as these guys have extreme reflexes, obviously when one 20-25 pinger encountered a 6 - 10 pinger, the 6 - 10 would have twice the amount of time (yes, I know we're talking about a mere 10 ms) to select and perform his decired action, and actually it ended up with quite a gap between the 20-25 pingers and the 6-10 / 10-14 pingers... the results was the same when we moved the players around, all the players from the 3 pools were playing at each location, thus making it fair... but the 20-25 pingers ended up in the bottom of the scoreboard each and every time. Interesting stuff, is for the medium/low skillers there were no such difference, as their skills, understanding of the game, reflexes and combination of these things where not in any way so quick that a few ms could make a difference. So the result of this was, it would actually make a difference, but only for the highest skilled of the lot, which is maybe around 5 - 10% tops of the players, and they will usually have select servers to play at, if they ever go public, where they are allowed to, and can use their high rate settings without lagging. So mostly they should not be taken into consideration, unless aiming directly at hosting a high skills server. ---- Now for the servers, I say stick with Hartlands advice. I am no Linux shark, but it seems most likely that by the stats to judge, he's advices are the most accurate you could aim for atm. L8r, Sharza _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
