EU/OC and NA Splatfest - Spongebob vs. Patrick

[Award]

I've only experienced lag once or maybe twice this splatfest. i didn't play for very long since i have to study for finals, but it was pretty much smooth sailing for me. all of my splatfests have been pretty much lagless aside from maybe one that had a few more that normal, but not that the entire splatfest was laggy. I'm starting to wonder if maybe i'm the laggy one and i just don't know it o_O. My internet is honestly not that fast compared to other players. And when i do feel like i'm lagging, i reset my internet or take a break for a while and everything's back to normal. Not to mention the fact that i use a router that's connected to two smartphones and a computer, sitting around 13 feet from my wii u and behind a wall. So who knows.

LOL, yeah that's the other thing I have no idea how to tell if lag is "me" or "everyone else" other than that my pings to google are consistent-ish. Like you I don't have the most super optimum internet (heck some folks on the West coast have internet that doesn't even EXIST here for ANY amount of money :) )
But Splatoon like most online games doesn't really use very much bandwidth at all - you don't need 2gigabit internet. 2mbps up/down is more than sufficient for splatoon by itself and even that is overkill. It's just latency that factors in and that's geography bound as much as anything else. From here the bottlenecks are going to be the big interchanges (NYC), the tenuous single fiber runs through hazardous terrain (mountain ranges), and the underwater single fiber runs. The issues to Japan and Asia in general are well documented (one fiber path under the Pacific - and if that's bottlenecked, as you can imagine Asia<->US communications often are it routs through Europe and then to Asia (so the delay for us East Coaster's is: Through the clogged NYC exchange, across the Rockies, under the Pacific....nope...too full....error sent BACK under the pacific through the rockies, through NYC and then forwarded again under the Atlantic, through Europe & the Alps and then onto Asia. "Low latecy" gaming from here to Asia is NEVER going to be good - even at the speed of light it's too slow. Add in bad stuff in between and it gets ugly - so that's a prime liklihood of the problem.

All that said I don't know how it routs between you and everyone else that was playing - if you have a connection out to europe first or if you add the step of coming here and going through NYC making it even worse. Which time zone are you? And when did you play Splatfest? If you had a good run of it, I'm curious what time of day it was throughout Asia :)

 

[Leronne]

Splatfest top 100

 

[Award]

@Leronne thx for the stats!

And....WT literal F??? I played against a lot of these people! Played with some of them....but I see more on this list I played AGAINST than played WITH. And I see a lot of these names that I BEAT when playing against them possibly with the help of other people on this list.

But seriously, what about my being WAY below the 2000 power stat told the game I should be primarily matched up against the top 100? Now I KNOW I am somehow targeted by the matchmaker. No matter my rank, no matter my splatfest power, the matchmaker STILL makes me play the named, identified 100 best players in the whole game! :P And if I managed to beat some of these guys (and I know I killed Dirty Dan quite a few times - he was also on my team once or twice) then Who on earth were the guys that I couldn't hit at ALL? if I could run with the top 100 and come out equal....and the people that were pwning me were NOT on this list.....

 

[Nero86]

Yeah that's the big question - how much of it is matchmaking against wildly superior players and how much of it is lag induced? I've never been able to tell the difference, or specifically identify lag unless I see distance teleporting (which I see often) or see ink out of sync with actions (and the firing in opposite directions etc.)

I'm starting to have a hard time determining if I just massively suck at the game compared to all these amazing super-players I often face off against, or if the game is most of the time purely unplayable at the speeds they foolishly designed it to play at in relation to how the internet works. Instagib splattershots are pretty much universal now, as are instagib jet squelchers. Pretty much all weapons are ohko now. For the other team, anyway.... So identifying "more lag than usual" is troublesome.

FWIW I experienced the same situation last splatfest after 9:30 or 10:00ET, so it's not Europe and the ME that's causing said lag issues, and obviously it's not Japan, it's someone else in the NoA region, be it just bad US connections (but why worse at night?) or S. America & Caribbean connections (@Rockenberg, @Leronne, and @Nero86 are in those areas and could probably help identify what they saw during their play time) and I recently found out that most of Asia Pacific outside Japan is also NoA territory (not sure about S. Korea) so that could be a part of it as well, I've heard the opposite direction was true - lag over there was awful so it might be related). We might just be fighting laggy Koreans instead of laggy Japanese when we're "NoA only" - And Korean competitive game intensity is (in)famous :)

I know that my ping normally is between 30-70 to google so it should be very stable for online gaming. But my ping in the best of times to niconico is 250 and can spike to 720 (almost 3/4 second.) Technically there's scarcely a reason to play a game this fast when you're 3/4 second behind the action- you could have been killed twice before you even saw an enemy.

Yet I always perceive it as just exceptionally good players that can avoid you, always be out of your range, and do not ever miss a shot - ever, with perfect tracking.

I get salty about bad matchmaking throwing me against these super players, but I'd be utterly p****d if the problem was that I was basically never playing the game at all half the time!

That said, 1490....from an S+, S+, S, S team leads me to believe more than lag is going on with the matchmaking. or a lot of people are getting massively screwed by the lag even worse than I am, which is unfathomable.

9:30 or 10:00ET pm? If so, it matches with terrible moments for me, 23:30 0:00 UTC-3. After 23:00 UTC-3 those haunted players start to appear, ghost towers that move alone, invisible bombs that explode and so on.
Since I'm normally staying away from Splatoon at this time I haven't experienced those horror stuff on last Splatfest.

My ping to Japanese AWS normally floats from 200 to 300, but I'm used to play like this, so no worries.

 

[Flareth]

How the hell does Dirty Dan end up on both teams? Is that another reference that I'm not getting, or did two people just get the same idea?

 

[Leronne]

How the hell does Dirty Dan end up on both teams? Is that another reference that I'm not getting, or did two people just get the same idea?

Well in the episode, spongebob and patrick were discussing which would be dirty dan. So in a way. Both are.

 

[Minato Arisato]

Splatfest top 100

View attachment 3098 View attachment 3099

I see a player named Brobol on Team SpongeBob. I ended up on his team for quite a few matches. He's one crazy Octobrush user.

 

[Inyo]

Both of the top players are apparently "FK" affiliated.

 

[Award]

9:30 or 10:00ET pm? If so, it matches with terrible moments for me, 23:30 0:00 UTC-3. After 23:00 UTC-3 those haunted players start to appear, ghost towers that move alone, invisible bombs that explode and so on.
Since I'm normally staying away from Splatoon at this time I haven't experienced those horror stuff on last Splatfest.

My ping to Japanese AWS normally floats from 200 to 300, but I'm used to play like this, so no worries.

Yep, 9:30 or 10PM ET - it gets brutal. But this time it continued into Sunday morning. So if you can I both get the same bad lag at the same time then, then we're both on the WRONG side of the region causing lag - I'll have to ask around to see when my friends saw the bad lag playing in non-Japan Asia - I'm guessing whenever WE see lag, they see low lag, and whenever we don't see lag, they see high lag because there's more from one region or the other on at the same time. Tokyo time that would be around 10:00 or 11:00AM Sunday there.

I'm thinking a lot of my "these players are so good I can't hit anyone and they kill me instantly and everything is moving so fast how do they DO this so fast??" moments are in fact not me sucking OR particularly good players, but players that already acted long ago so it seems like they instantly react. I was playing TC yesterday and shot someone off the tower - the kill icon showed them off the bottom behind the little ledge under the left wall in Moray. Wait - so the guy I just shot off the tower.....wasn't ON the tower??? No WONDER I miss every shot when playing Moray TC half the time! If we go by splatfest and the play I saw from the Top 100 versus the unbeatable amazing players who are NOT on the top 100 - the players that destroyed me were not actually particularly great at all.

How the hell does Dirty Dan end up on both teams? Is that another reference that I'm not getting, or did two people just get the same idea?

Could be two people chosing the same name...who happen to be equally the best players in the game. Or more likely it's the same person with two accounts both starting at S+, just like how I was S tier in both Patrick and Spongebob. Even if my play didn't seem to look like it on Spongebob :p

It's just like how you see "Award" on there 3 times, twice for Patric....errr...wait...am I the only one that sees it there? (*Fires up Photoshop*) ;)

 

[Nero86]

Yep, 9:30 or 10PM ET - it gets brutal. But this time it continued into Sunday morning. So if you can I both get the same bad lag at the same time then, then we're both on the WRONG side of the region causing lag - I'll have to ask around to see when my friends saw the bad lag playing in non-Japan Asia - I'm guessing whenever WE see lag, they see low lag, and whenever we don't see lag, they see high lag because there's more from one region or the other on at the same time. Tokyo time that would be around 10:00 or 11:00AM Sunday there.

I'm thinking a lot of my "these players are so good I can't hit anyone and they kill me instantly and everything is moving so fast how do they DO this so fast??" moments are in fact not me sucking OR particularly good players, but players that already acted long ago so it seems like they instantly react. I was playing TC yesterday and shot someone off the tower - the kill icon showed them off the bottom behind the little ledge under the left wall in Moray. Wait - so the guy I just shot off the tower.....wasn't ON the tower??? No WONDER I miss every shot when playing Moray TC half the time! If we go by splatfest and the play I saw from the Top 100 versus the unbeatable amazing players who are NOT on the top 100 - the players that destroyed me were not actually particularly great at all.

I think there're some japanese players here who can help us understand better how does that time goes for them. @syyama what's the most laggy hours for you on splatoon?

 

[Award]

I think there're some japanese players here who can help us understand better how does that time goes for them. @syyama what's the most laggy hours for you on splatoon?

Technically Japan doesn't factor in since Splatfest this time included pretty much the whole world EXCEPT Japan, but they're certainly the biggest factor on normal ranked and the time of day would still be relevant :) But since Japan alone consists of such a majority of Splatoon's players I wonder if it's as relevant as other countries in their region.

 

[Nero86]

Technically Japan doesn't factor in since Splatfest this time included pretty much the whole world EXCEPT Japan, but they're certainly the biggest factor on normal ranked and the time of day would still be relevant :) But since Japan alone consists of such a majority of Splatoon's players I wonder if it's as relevant as other countries in their region.

Oh nono, I was just asking him about common matches aside from splatfest. At least on S I play with 7 japanese players on almost all of my matches.

 

[Award]

Oh nono, I was just asking him about common matches aside from splatfest. At least on S I play with 7 japanese players on almost all of my matches.

Yeah, I pretty much exclusively play with Japanese players much of the time as well. I always thought that when the really bad (read: Ultra super players with perfect aim that can't be hit and cover half a map before I can leave spawn) came on in ranked it was due to it being a certain time of day in Japan and certain types of players that must come on or something (the Japanese equivalent of Dorito-dust covered Mountain Dew guzzling 1337 Gamerz that I presumed were on in the middle of the night there). But since the same thing seems to be the case when Japan isn't even playing, during NA Splatfests, I suppose it's not a Japan specific issue. But it could still be Asia-specific and lag induced, in which case the blame lies squarely on Nintendo for hosting global servers for a twitch-action game.

 

[Ulk]

I'm 6 hours ahead of you guys and still mostly meet Japanese players. I must say though, I have no greater issues with them when it comes to lag than I have with people from the US.

 

[Award]

I'm 6 hours ahead of you guys and still mostly meet Japanese players. I must say though, I have no greater issues with them when it comes to lag than I have with people from the US.

That's probably what I expected, lag-wise. you're smack in the middle so it should be fairly equidistant. On the US East Coast we get pretty badly screwed with lag to Asian servers. It's a LONG trip through the West Coast to then go to Japan, OR a long trip to get to YOU first before it gets routed to Japan. It's just a LONG trip no matter how you slice it. Not just Japan but to any where in Asia. Heck Japan probably fares better just because their volume of network traffic is set up to handle it more than some other countries.

If you ping niconico.co.jp what's the response time?

 

[Ulk]

That's probably what I expected, lag-wise. you're smack in the middle so it should be fairly equidistant. On the US East Coast we get pretty badly screwed with lag to Asian servers. It's a LONG trip through the West Coast to then go to Japan, OR a long trip to get to YOU first before it gets routed to Japan. It's just a LONG trip no matter how you slice it. Not just Japan but to any where in Asia. Heck Japan probably fares better just because their volume of network traffic is set up to handle it more than some other countries.

If you ping niconico.co.jp what's the response time?

That definitely makes sense. Probably also explains why people in the US generally have lag issues that seem to be a lot more severe than we ones we have during gaming.

And that depends, know a good site where I can test it?

 

[Award]

That definitely makes sense. Probably also explains why people in the US generally have lag issues that seem to be a lot more severe than we ones we have during gaming.

And that depends, know a good site where I can test it?

Well we have lag issues for two different reasons. The first is our internet infrastructure kind of sucks. People like prodding us for being so far behind much of the world in internet infrastructure, and part of it is due to the politically connected monopolies that control rollouts (buy your politician, they make sure nobody will compete against you no matter how bad your service is) but part of their reasoning is genuine: The geography here just requires a lot of distance between lines, and there's a lot of rugged terrain that is a pain or prohibitively expensive to get through (under/around the massive Great Lakes, through two mountain ranges, etc.) so running a single pipe of lines under the mountain is going to be a lot more likely than well positioned lines across the entire range - but it also means more bottleneck potential. So you lay down wire for $10 billion, and then 5 years moves by and it's now obsolete and speeds can be 10x faster - who's going to lay down another $10b in line? Plus all the bureaucracy with how much individual line gets laid at the street level, etc, where not everything is densely populated, so it costs a fortune to run wire, and they can never make it back selling service. So there's real world (and corruption) issues that lead to some of the US's lag problem. BUT yeah, anything involving global servers will have issues just due to distance and funneling it through so many layers of infrastructure. If the game is playable NYC to L.A. it's not the local infrastructure that's the issue. But the Pacific lines can only take so much data and it has to go through both ends of the grid. Same the other way. The "Fast" route from the East is to first route to California then under the Pacific to Japan, then to whatever country in Asia it's getting to. The "alternate" if that's backed up is it first goes through to Europe then to Japan then to Asia. So here we get 2-4 national infrastructures to get through - your lag PLUS our lag!

For me, the BEST case scenario against Japanese players is being 1/4 second behind. It's not always "that good." IMO Nintendo set up a problem for the Splatoon brand. It's too fast. ttk should never be faster than the worst internet latency between players. And in Splatoon, it is. But the Splatoon brand is "speed" now - they won't be able to fix that in the future.

To test your ping, if you're on a Windows machine, just searc for "cmd" to open a command prompt and type "ping niconico.co.jp." On a Linux machine, same thing in any shell prompt. On Mac...can't help there, not sure where they hide the shell prompts :) But you're in DE - nobody buys Mac there, right? ;)

 

[Sol64]

My last hour matches in the splatfest.

 

[Award]

My last hour matches in the splatfest.

Not fair, I got to play with/against almost everyone in your lobbies EXCEPT you! :P :(

On the other hand, I again question why the game decided to pit me against the top 100 when my power level was like 1500-1600?

 

[Ulk]

Well we have lag issues for two different reasons. The first is our internet infrastructure kind of sucks. People like prodding us for being so far behind much of the world in internet infrastructure, and part of it is due to the politically connected monopolies that control rollouts (buy your politician, they make sure nobody will compete against you no matter how bad your service is) but part of their reasoning is genuine: The geography here just requires a lot of distance between lines, and there's a lot of rugged terrain that is a pain or prohibitively expensive to get through (under/around the massive Great Lakes, through two mountain ranges, etc.) so running a single pipe of lines under the mountain is going to be a lot more likely than well positioned lines across the entire range - but it also means more bottleneck potential. So you lay down wire for $10 billion, and then 5 years moves by and it's now obsolete and speeds can be 10x faster - who's going to lay down another $10b in line? Plus all the bureaucracy with how much individual line gets laid at the street level, etc, where not everything is densely populated, so it costs a fortune to run wire, and they can never make it back selling service. So there's real world (and corruption) issues that lead to some of the US's lag problem. BUT yeah, anything involving global servers will have issues just due to distance and funneling it through so many layers of infrastructure. If the game is playable NYC to L.A. it's not the local infrastructure that's the issue. But the Pacific lines can only take so much data and it has to go through both ends of the grid. Same the other way. The "Fast" route from the East is to first route to California then under the Pacific to Japan, then to whatever country in Asia it's getting to. The "alternate" if that's backed up is it first goes through to Europe then to Japan then to Asia. So here we get 2-4 national infrastructures to get through - your lag PLUS our lag!

For me, the BEST case scenario against Japanese players is being 1/4 second behind. It's not always "that good." IMO Nintendo set up a problem for the Splatoon brand. It's too fast. ttk should never be faster than the worst internet latency between players. And in Splatoon, it is. But the Splatoon brand is "speed" now - they won't be able to fix that in the future.

To test your ping, if you're on a Windows machine, just searc for "cmd" to open a command prompt and type "ping niconico.co.jp." On a Linux machine, same thing in any shell prompt. On Mac...can't help there, not sure where they hide the shell prompts :) But you're in DE - nobody buys Mac there, right? ;)

You really know a lot about that, don't you? You make me feel like one of these grannies who don't know **** about computers and the internet and go out there to find viruses to download.

By the way, the ping I get is 280ms for the Japanese server. As little as I know about all this stuff, I know that this is not too good considering regular speed tests tell me I have a ping of 20ms.