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by Strilanc 505 days ago
It doesn't need to be perceptible to cause a difference in a game.

Suppose two players notice each other at the same time (e.g. as would naturally happen when walking around a corner in a shooter), first to shoot wins, and their total latencies are identical Gaussians with a standard deviation of 100ms. Then a 6.5ms reduction in latency is worth an additional 2.5% chance of winning the trade. Maybe you won't notice this on a moment by moment basis, but take statistics and its impact should be measurable.

In ELO terms a 2.5% gain in win rate is around a 10 point increase (simplifying by assuming that single Gaussian is the entire game). That's small, but if you were a hardcore player and all it took to raise your ELO by 10 points was using a better monitor/mouse/OS... why not? Doing that is cheap compared to the time investment required to improve your ELO another 10 points with practice (unless you're just starting).

Also, I think you'd be surprised what people can perceive in a context where they are practiced. Speed runners hit frame perfect tricks in 60FPS games. That's not reaction time but it does intimately involve consistent control latency between practice and execution.

2 comments

Slightly off topic…

> Suppose two players notice each other at the same time (e.g. as would naturally happen when walking around a corner in a shooter)

This is not true for third person games. Depending on a left sided or right sided peek and your angle or approach, players see asymmetrically.

For example, Fortnite is a right side peek game. Peeking right is safer than peeking left as less of your body is exposed before your camera turns the corner.

I believe distance also plays a part in the angles.

Yeah, network latency and client side prediction and accuracy will also play huge roles. The actual distributions will be very complex, but in general reacting faster is going to be better.
Do people not play deathmatches on LAN parties anymore these days? 2.5 is huge if the game lasts long enough that someone would be leading with 200. ;)