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Comment by Phlarp | Hacker News Reader

I've played many games of Starcraft on a Verizon LTE connection. Many (most?) online games have 250ms of latency "built in" to even the playing field for users with ping times below 250ms. LTE latency is usually closer to 50ms

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250 ms for SC2 is a huge handicap and is definitely not added to the game. I can't imagine marine splitting(or really playing BW at all) with that kind of penalty.

That being said, Targa is famous for playing for a while via a 4g connection in Australia. So playing the game well is certainly possible.

250ms is probably ok for RTSs and turn based games, but would not work for anything fast paced.

I am confused how RTSes are not fast paced. I can't imagine any FPS has players do the same levels of Actions per minute [1] as some good RTS players.

[1] http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Actions_per_minute

It's pretty easy to do lag compensation on RTSs. You have the server run a copy of the game locally and just sync with the clients. Typically, RTSs have a lot of actions, but timing isn't as crucial. So, if things get out of sync, you just buffer until you everything catches back up again. You can even do things like vary the speed of the game (FPS) without the players noticing much. With games that rely on precise timing as a core mechanics (e.g. a shooter, fighting, or rhythm), the player is going to notice that an action took 10ms and then the next time they did it, it took 20, because they'll actually miss their target.

Twitch shooters, at least, definitely do _not_ have built in latency, and 250ms is unplayable.

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