Ping Issue

"I jumped that laser and still got hit!"

What is Network Latency/Ping?

Your network latency is how long it takes for packets of information to be transferred to and from a sender and a receiver. In this case, it is how long it takes for you to send data to and receive data from the game servers. It is synonymously used with "ping," and the lower it is, the more responsive and visually accurate things will feel for you. The higher it is, the more things will feel as if they "lag behind" and be visually inaccurate.

Just because information is being received much later for those with higher ping doesn't mean that the server won't continue to execute things at its own pace. In the context of lasers, this means players with higher ping will see them appear much later than someone with lower ping. However, the hitbox of the lasers on the server will remain the same for everybody. This effectively makes the visuals of lasers disjointed from their actual hitbox. If you ever wonder why you keep dying to lasers when you feel that you were about to time it perfectly, or died way earlier than visually suggested, it may be your connection.

This image is not a placeholder.

• The top side represents a player with high ping and the bottom represents a player with low ping.

• The red laser is where it appears on one's screen

• While the blue laser is the actual hitbox of the laser.

Viewing your Ping

You can enable numerical values on your scoreboard HUD by doing the following.

Go to: Options -> Multiplayer -> Advanced -> Check "Display ping values as text" Or simply checkmark the box in Advanced Options under HUD Options.

Alternatively, you can view your ping and other network information without having to view the scoreboard via the command below.

net_graph 1

Dealing with High Ping

So, how do you deal with this? Players with high ping will essentially have to react faster. Since things will be coming later, visually, their hitboxes will arrive sooner than anticipated. Using Horizontal lasers, for example, if you had to jump to dodge, you would have to jump early.

For comparison, here's how you may deal with lasers at lower ping and the potential mistakes that may be made.

If you had somewhere around 100+ ping, then you would begin to start having to jump into the laser visually. For crouching you would have to crouch much earlier. For all lasers in general you will just need to act sooner.

Of course, depending on how high or low your ping is, you'll have to do something different. It will take some practice to figure out the timings for yourself. Because lasers for different maps vary in type and hitbox shape, you'll need to practice for them both offline or on-the-fly.