[hackinthebochs]

I think you misunderstood my point. In terms of actual advantage, 1ms vs 5ms is negligible, considering the fact that human reaction time is 200ms. So in the case of shooting someone as they popped out from behind a corner, the 200ms reaction time + human variation + variation in network latency + discreet server time, will absolutely dominate the effects.

I definitely agree that small latencies can be noticed, even latencies approaching 5ms (but not 5ms itself--I've seen monitor tests done that showed this).

[Tuna-Fish]

> I think you misunderstood my point. In terms of actual advantage, 1ms vs 5ms is negligible, considering the fact that human reaction time is 200ms.

You did not understand the point of my post. The quality that matters is total latency. How long a human takes to react is completely irrelevant to what level of latency has an effect. Whether average human reaction time was 1ms or 1s doesn't matter. All that matters is that your loop is shorter than his, and your reaction time is very near his, so any advantage counts.

> the 200ms reaction time + human variation + variation in network latency + discreet server time, will absolutely dominate the effects.

Server tick time is the same for everyone. Top level gaming tourneys are held in lans, where the players typically make sure that the network latency from their machine to the server is not any greater than from anyone else. However, none of that matters to the question at hand.

Assume that total latency of the system, including the player, can be approximated by:

Human_reaction_time + network_lag + processing_lag + display_lag

and assume all are normally distributed random around some base value, except display lag, and you have:

(midpoint, standard deviation)

rand(200,20) + rand(20,5) + rand(16,2) + 15

while I have:

rand(200,20) + rand(20,5) + rand(16,2) + 5

The total latency is utterly dominated by the human processing time. Yet if we model this statistically, and assume that lower latency wins, the one with the faster screen wins 63% of time. That's enough of an edge that people pay money for it.

[hackinthebochs]

No I understood your point, I just don't agree that it results in any meaningful advantage. What you didn't model was the fact that the server does not process packets immediately as they are received. They are buffered and processed in batch during a server tick. If the two packets from different players are not received along a tick boundary, then the server will effectively consider them simultaneous.

And remember, we're considering 1ms vs 5ms, so the difference would be 4ms in this case. I would like to see what percentage an advantage someone has in this setup. Even 63% isn't anything significant considering skill comes down to game knowledge rather than absolute reaction time. People will pay for smaller/bigger numbers, sure. But that doesn't mean there is anything practically significant about it.