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Comment by Gunax | Hacker News Reader

I think they missed a main factor: lag compensation inproved greatly.

The old Quake style games often had very naive networking. Whereas now, I seldom notice the network even exists.

It's not that lag has changed much--contrary to the article, broadband is less important in games. It's latency that matters, not bandwidth. Team fortress 1 can run on 16kbps.

And latency is still the same as I had 20 uears ago, 50-150ms.

But the benefit of LAN was that it was the only way to experience latency free gameplay. And it really did make a big difference. In comparison, internet play always felt weird after experiencing LAN.

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Most of the online games today seem even worse for connection than before. I hear that only Fortnight, CSGO, and Valorant are using good servers.

Even in all online FPS games, due to the client predicting movement - there's still peeker's advantage due to your player being slightly behind on other's screens, so you see enemies before they see you.

This doesn't matter for the majority of players but that's why high skilled CSGO and other shooters must still use LAN for high level play. There's no entirely defeating peeker's advantage and other artifacts from latency.

Valorant, league of legends, and CSGO have their own CDN to try to help with connections. Can't really comment on other game's netcodes because they vary so much. For example, BF1 devs removed lag compensation entirely. League has no lag compensation since it's not a shooter. CSGO lag compensates a fixed amount so consistent ping is more important than fixed ping.

It has nothing to do with their network infrastructure and everything to do with the way they calculate player movement, input, and perform lag compensation.

Here's another surprise for you: although Fortnite and Valorant are on Unreal, they don't use the default multiplayer networking code. You can't create a reliable game with it.

Fighting games have gotten much better due to rollback - Japanese developers for years would release games that were just unusable outside Japan and now it’s fine.

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