Genocide's Blogs

Lag is bad right? It makes you lose, yes? Perhaps not.  Most of the time I have to agree with this and pull an FPS Doug on the keyboard/controller. It’s a typical scenario, especially for us NZ’ers;  You’re running towards an enemy on *Insert game here* and you’re shooting him, sometimes you shoot/melee before they do and somehow they manage to beat you. WTF? This makes it especially frustrating when you know that you’re not losing due to your skill level.

But is lag as bad as we think? Personally, I have been plagued with the L word all my gaming life. It’s become part of the game now and I’ve learned to deal with it, and sometimes even compensate for it. And that makes me think, if I never had any lag, would I be trying as hard as I do every day because of lag? Would I be as skilled? Without lag, I might not even have to try, and therefore I would eventually get careless and lose skill.

But with lag, I’m always trying twice as hard as I normally might do, just to compete with people on better connections. So when/if I ever play on a good connection, it seems natural that I would still be trying harder than the other players, and have a better chance of winning. It reminds me of Year12 graphics – my teacher would always be purposely strict and tough on our marks, to make us improve them so that when the projects got sent away, we would have even better marks than we expected.

Some games do have features that will find good connections for you, for example Halo3 has an option to search by good connection, which will improve the amount of lag, but you have to trade off for longer matchmaking times. Call of Duty WAW also has this feature, which seems to work well, probably due to the amount of people playing currently. Even FarCry2 has a ping indicator when you list all matches, which makes it faster to join better games. You would think with the amount of copying going on in the gaming industry, developers would have stolen this idea and implemented it in their games by now, but no.

So in a way lag is just preparing you for the real games, and when they happen you’ll be so used to sucking that you’ll probably do better! So, try to put up with it for now, resist throwing the controller (through the coffee table ;) ) keep that Wii-strap secured, and don’t chuck the boomerang just yet. Hold out until you get those heavenly green bars and try to keep the lag at bay. But soon this will all be irrelevant, right Mr Key?

Oh and heres a picture of Misa Campo, just for DjKicks.