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Comment by asadkn | Hacker News Reader

If he practiced the game living in Pakistan, he has played the game at a latency of 170-250ms. And it varies depending on the time of the day with 5-30% packet loss at peak times.

The lag of ~200ms makes a huge difference when compared to players from EU and NA who play at latency of 10-30. Now that's what makes it even more impressive. Adapting from playing at high latency to low latency also takes quite some time.

Perhaps that should have been the most highlighted fact considering it's Hacker News.

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I guess the most important fact here is, his parents somehow supporting him through all this. I am an Indian and I know firsthand how controlling Asian parents can be.

Here is a documentary about hyhy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC74gSReUtE . Today his former teammates make more than 100K USD/annum. But owing to variety of factors(which I suppose includes big opposition from Family) he missed the boat big time.

Have you played games before? Higher latency has nothing to do with more skill. It makes the game awful for for the player and the people he's playing against, not harder, just worse. If anything playing at that latency has held his skill back, not served as a barrier to increase his skill. I say this as a top 200 global SC2 player.

It depends on the lag compensation of the game in question. For instance, in league of legends, you can't do a few champion combos (like Alistar's headbutt + pulverize) on a lag greater than 200ms. But enemy skills register just fine.

Packet loss is even more awful when your skills don't register or you don't know what's going on for a second or two.

This does puts the players at an unfair disadvantage.

He must have played on LAN.

That might be true but that would have meant he was practicing against very casual players of very different skills. Someone with access to his match history might be able to tell better, but I am pretty sure he had to play online to let match-making find players of similar skills.

Matchmaking was accessible to all players starting in 2012 when Valve released Dota 2 publicly. Before that finding a game with opponents of equal skill was difficult if not impossible. Playing in a LAN cafe as Sumail did was probably your best bet to get good games.

even then, he'd have still been limited by his region. I don't know much about the DoTA scene, (I mostly watch counter-strike) but in CS living in a region like the middle east would be a serious setback in terms of LAN play. you might not have the same ease of access to LANs and your region might not have any LANs at all, leaving you to foot the bill for travel to Europe and the US to take part.

A counter-strike brazilian team recently moved to North America so they would have better access to teams and leagues. it really can be a game-changer for developing talent.

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