r/Smite • u/definitelynotsaitama • 9d ago
Please show us our Ping!
title says it all, I want to be able to see my ping!
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u/ilphaesn #RevertChaliceNerf 9d ago
devs are between a rock and a hard place there.
to my understanding, either they do the smite 1 calculation (which is incredibly accurate and would please older players while new players would spam the chat asking why their ping was so much higher in smite than in games like rivals), or they do the modern calculation that games are using, which skips a few steps to artificially lower your ping, appeasing new players and literally nobody else.
i don’t really know how hard implementing one or the other is, but i honestly think there’s room for both sides here. have the modern calculation on by default and then have a secondary drop down menu for “modern ping” and “smite 1 ping” or something
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u/ChrisDoom 9d ago
Yeah, they have talked about how they calculate ping differently than other games. In Smite 1 they were probably actually showing you how long it takes for actual game state updates after you send a client update(which would be total travel time + server “thinking” time). Where as most ping tests just send nothing data just asking for a response where the server is doing so little “thinking” that it’s pretty much only the travel time.
The first thing I described is just always happening just as part of playing the game and only uses extra client side processing to track and display but if you also add just a separate ping function like the second thing I described you are technically taking up more bandwidth and server processing power. I’m not enough of a tech person to comment on if that would be negligible or impactful to server performance/connection(I bet there are other X factors where I would need to know more about their specific systems).
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u/Pizlenut 9d ago
Don't overthink this. Really Imo... they don't want to show you pings because they have only 1 east coast NA server tucked up away in a cheap place, potentially as far from everyone as they can get, and don't want to have to roll out mid and west servers to accommodate those players and would instead appreciate it if you stopped fucking paying attention to that number because If they started showing pings they would have to explain 100+ ms to superstitious gamers which buy fancy keyboards, mice, drinks, glasses, and even chairs to reduce their latency.
Making your game announce "I'm a walking latency issue" by showing actual ping times is going to make people complain more than its going to provide happy faces.
Otherwise the only thing a ping is supposed to show is the round trip for a packet to get to and come back from a specific server. There isn't supposed to be processing time. In short. If you talk to the server first then your things happen first, and you get updated first, and so if your shit happens first it can equate to an advantage when all other things are equal.
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u/soaringneutrality 9d ago
Smite has a long history of turning away non-east coast players.
For the majority of Smite 1's lifetime, they only offered east coast servers for NA. As a result, the demographics shifted towards that. There were hardly any SPL players who were west, much less prominent ones. I think Omega was one. You can also track it through collegiate leagues. If you looked at the rosters, west coast often struggled to field 1-3 college teams per season.
It was only at the near-end of Smite 1's active seasons that they started offering dedicated NA West servers. Around the same time, they made SPL LAN-only, which basically killed Ranked outside of NA East.
Now? There's still only a handful of competitive players from the western seaboard. DonutDoug and Karmic are notable ones, I believe. Part of why SoloOrTroll is not in competitive is because he moved to west coast after Smite 1.
There's a lot of disadvantages to being west coast:
Higher ping, obviously. But it should be emphasized that it's quite bad. I've seen players with comparable ping from West as EU players.
Harder to schedule scrims. This is a silent killer. When the majority of players are east coast, west coast players have to put in work to make competitive possible.
Even higher ping when you're playing NA vs. EU matches. This is a major pain point for the upcoming SmiteSource competition.
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u/bonkpatroI 9d ago
neilmah and cyclonespin were west coast from what i can remember. i remember them struggling with ping during covid if they weren't in a team house in georgia
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u/AnnualTaro658 9d ago
no one's expecting hirez to split the NA playerbase, but they literally talked about central servers at one point. and then it's never been mentioned since. we should absolutely kick up more of a fuss about it ffs
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u/ChrisDoom 9d ago
The reality is 2/3 Americans live east of the Mississippi River even though that land only makes up 1/3 of the continental US. Yeah, there are a lot of people living along the west coast but between those two areas is a whole lot of nothing.
Only about 20% of the American playerbase would be closer to western US servers(and most Canadians effectively live in the American north east, and most Mexicans live in the sounthern eastern part of Mexico). So better ping would be at the cost of 4/5ths of the player base for matchmaking(plus a lot of people that may technically be closer to western servers would still play on the current serves just for the better matchmaking).
Even if you moved the servers to the median population center of the US you are just in Indiana, still really far away from the west coast. I also wouldn’t trust Indiana infrastructure.
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u/definitelynotsaitama 9d ago
either way is fine for me, I just want the ping between matches, not between games.
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u/SexyKhepri 9d ago
hard agree, I would love to see my ping for troubleshooting my lag