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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

> The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was.

This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losing lots of packets or you have some epic buffering somewhere.

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Example: the slow-motion replay of this demo causes the flashing of the net icon due to the packet frequency red-shift:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdkDjsBiO58

> packet frequency red-shift.

Hmmm. Is that a term of art? I thought you were being funny, but I found at least one paper talking about packet red-shift: https://upcommons.upc.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/00bbf88...

You're assuming a consistent connection - if your ping is 2 seconds, it's unlikely you're receiving each packet precisely 1 second late - much more likely the delay will be variable over time, probably not normally as high as +/-15% to cause 300ms gaps, but certainly possible.

But as long as you keep receiving traffic in a 300 ms period, the indicator wouldn't show. I've used radio internet with 1+ second ping, and while laggy, the jitter was surprisingly uniform.

Oh sweet summerchild.

When OG games were released we were playing on LAN with BNC terminators. That's why the Q1 netcode is so bad.

When we moved to online we didn't had the infra we have today.

Bonus point: CS at one point just halved the ping in the UI so players would think it was more responsive.

In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000 km long ethernet cable.

Unless you are playing Quake through Iridium.

When Quake(world) was released, it was common to play games on dial-up modems, where 250+ milliseconds was a normal ping time. If you played on a distant server, you could easily get over 500 milliseconds or even much worse.

Geostationary satellite internet has garbage pings too.

We used to play these games on dial-up where ~300ms pings were pretty common.

Moving to a cable connection in ~2001 was shocking in comparison!

Funny, my first cable connection was waaay worse than dailup. Abysmal pings and speeds maxing out around 3kb/sec. It took a few years to reach 32kb/sec which felt insane.

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