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Comment by madanparas | Hacker News Reader

The article opens by saying LAN's chief advantage was "nearly eliminating latency" and closes by saying revival is as easy as sharing your Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi and a wired switch are not the same thing. The one thing that made LAN parties technically distinctive is the one thing the revival pitch quietly removes.

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There's a huge difference between the latency you get from connecting to each other via the Internet, and the latency you get going via a local network, even if that network is a wireless one.

There's an even bigger difference between that, and going online via the Internet back in the days when LAN parties were really popular, because the most common method of connecting to the internet was via modem.

IME WiFi always adds ~20ms, which might be more than a server in your city (though realistically 50ms is a good number and 100ms is acceptable).

But I expect this number gets worse in a LAN party due to contention.

The distinction they're drawing isn't WLAN vs LAN but WAN vs LAN. Remember that in the peak days of the LAN party it was an alternative to gaming on dial-up or DSL - even if you had a good connection it was unlikely the whole game had one. A reasonable Wi-Fi connection today is miles beyond the WAN connections of Y2K.

The big LAN parties also had a fat internet connection at a time when the best you could have at home was INSD. But even more important was that everyone at the LAN shared their piracy collections over DC++ or FTP. Good times.

> that everyone at the LAN shared their piracy collections over DC++ or FTP

And that one person sharing their 100GB (virtually unheard of amount of storage at the time) archive of porn, proudly announcing themselves as a "winner" of something at the end of the party.

The millisecond added by Wi-Fi isn't changing the experience.

Just avoid or throttle downloads while playing.

Average latency difference isn't much, but wireless's inherent sensitivity to interference makes the worst-case latency difference a lot higher. I don't want to lose a game because somebody in the vicinity turned on a poorly shielded microwave oven. If you're going to all the effort of getting everybody together in person, why not do it right and set up a wired network?

> I don't want to lose a game because somebody in the vicinity turned on a poorly shielded microwave oven.

You shouldn't be using 2.4GHz anyway.

And there isn't much else that's likely to interfere out of nowhere.

> If you're going to all the effort of getting everybody together in person, why not do it right and set up a wired network?

Sure, go ahead and buy a bulk pack of cables, but I don't think it's going to have a particularly large impact on a generic small LAN.

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