So Many Variables!!!

[CrossFitKila717]

Trying to find the right settings seem next to impossible since there’s so many variables that affect connection! It’s frustrating when every time you think you have the right settings and good gameplay, it goes South for no apparent reason. Testing on PingPlotter while saturating line using Speedtest, I get stable connection. While my line is idle (or at least console not turned on), my line is stable. As soon as I get into lobbies, I get pretty big, choppy spikes and depending on the room, shoot first die first. This is with the R1, using DumaOS & playing BO4. While in game, I’ll change my sliders around to see any difference since that rules out changing of lobbies, players etc, which can influence the outcome. Doesn’t seem to matter if I use port forwarding, UPNP, IPV6 etc.......tried all different combinations & still get inconsistent results. Again, my ISP & line seem to be stable, it’s just “in game” that’s the issue. My modem is new & all my hardware is spot on. Some people make it look & sound so easy but there’s so many factors that I feel are out of our control, even with the Duma. 

What are your thoughts, experiences? I know higher speeds shouldn’t matter but I’m trying it anyways. Going from 200/10 up to 400/20 with Spectrum. 

Thanks for any and all input!

[Macca65]

I used to  try every conceivable combination to try and get a good setting. I spent countless hours tweaking settings until I thought Eureka! I have them on point, only for the next game to totally trash that idea.

I agree entirely in what you say, there are to many variables to control, you can get everything right at your end but can't control who joins the lobby.

I mainly play WWII, and playing yesterday and a particular player was dominating the play. He/she was top for about the first 5/6 games or so. Next minute was nowhere, his/her scores we always in the negative, I could imagine them going "WTF" is going on!

I don't touch any of my settings anymore, don't even remember what setting my sliders are on, I just boot up and play, if it's good ok, if it's bad ok I don't sweat it anymore :)

[Netduma Alex]

I congratulate you on your high level of chill, although if everybody was so chill I guess nobody would buy Netdumas...

The internet in general is so inconsistent and a lot of it can depend on where you live, the time of day, the game servers... Your thread title sums it up, there's so many variables!

Netduma's long term goal would be to enable users to easily minimize all of these elements of randomness. At present, I find that Anti-Bufferbloat is the most powerful way to make your connection more consistent and predictable.

[CrossFitKila717]

8 hours ago, Macca61 said:

I used to  try every conceivable combination to try and get a good setting. I spent countless hours tweaking settings until I thought Eureka! I have them on point, only for the next game to totally trash that idea.

I agree entirely in what you say, there are to many variables to control, you can get everything right at your end but can't control who joins the lobby.

I mainly play WWII, and playing yesterday and a particular player was dominating the play. He/she was top for about the first 5/6 games or so. Next minute was nowhere, his/her scores we always in the negative, I could imagine them going "WTF" is going on!

I don't touch any of my settings anymore, don't even remember what setting my sliders are on, I just boot up and play, if it's good ok, if it's bad ok I don't sweat it anymore

I still think WW2 is my favorite!! I alternate between that & BO4. I’m not the best but good enough to know when I should’ve won a gunfight or at least “hurt” the dude since I put half a clip in him as he still is able to escape around a corner! Lol 😂 Absolutely amazes me sometimes. Then I start adjusting settings & it’s always hit or miss.....I put a lot of time & money into this to have the ultimate setup & still feel like a noob sometimes. 😔

[Macca65]

2 hours ago, CrossFitKila717 said:

I still think WW2 is my favorite!! I alternate between that & BO4. I’m not the best but good enough to know when I should’ve won a gunfight or at least “hurt” the dude since I put half a clip in him as he still is able to escape around a corner! Lol 😂 Absolutely amazes me sometimes. Then I start adjusting settings & it’s always hit or miss.....I put a lot of time & money into this to have the ultimate setup & still feel like a noob sometimes. 😔

I know, I just laugh at the inconsistency of it all. As you say  you empty your mag into someone who then turns and kills you. But I know that has been me at some point, where I should have been done, but sponged their rounds and killed them.

It even seems to me that the server decides who is going to win. I have been in matches where one team is 20 points ahead and then it's like a switch being thrown and you lose the next 30 points to lose 75 -73 74 it's totally weird.

[Zennon]

Just now, Macca61 said:

I know, I just laugh at the inconsistency of it all. As you say  you empty your mag into someone who then turns and kills you. But I know that has been me at some point, where I should have been done, but sponged their rounds and killed them.

Ah the Activision algorithm, it is so strong in Blops4 .

[Bert]

You will never get this totally right.

A Netduma router or any other router with QoS can only control traffic outgoing at your own network and there is stops. Netduma/DumaOS also have the option to use a geofilter to limit connections, that's where you get the major advantage over other brands.

First of all, there is no dedicated servers in CoD in true sense of the word. A true dedicated server is an actual physical server dedicated to running the hosting software and has it's own internet connection.  What we call dedicated servers in CoD is a program running in a cloud, this cloud has multiple access nodes  which all have their own traffic load, and the cloud itself is running numerous other programs requiring internet bandwidth and prioritization levels. So performance of the hosting/server program is reliant on total usage of the cloud it's running in and total bandwidth usage of the cloud. If you have ever seen a complex like this, my place in Europe is close to a Microsoft datacenter, and the place is massive. You're easily talking over 10 football fields long and wide, having over 25 warehouse sized buildings containing their serverpark. So you can imagine it doesn't get it's internet through a single UTP cable, there is multiple fiberoptic backbones coming in. It has actually happened that I was connected to the same server complex. DumaOS showed 41ms ping. Game finishes, next game loads, I am playing on another uplink on the same servercomplex and ping read 33ms. So we can already see that their servers themselves are inconsistent.

Before I continue, this is a good basis read:
http://denkirson.proboards.com/thread/5972/networking-lag-compensation-hit-detection
I think it's posted here before but it's a good foundation as to why there is issues and what is this terrible lag comp people on the internet talk about.

Traffic coming from your router doesn't go straight to the server, but first has to cross your ISP's network. From there it goes on one or more backbones owned by a third party. From there, it usually gets connected up to a internet exchange, a place where these backbones meet and a lot of high end serverparks have a very close connection to these places, or are directly plugged in. On every segment, the owner of the network sets his own traffic shaping and prioritization ques.

One of the largest Internet Exchanges in Europe is AMS-IX. For reference you can see how much traffic they process: https://stats.ams-ix.net/index.html What is funny here is that you can see exactly what peak time is for internet usage and peak load on the backbones and the network.

Beginning at your ISP. Your ISP is usually oversubscribed factor 100 to factor 500. They expect their customers to use their internet in bursts so they can sell the same bandwidth multiple times if you want to call it that. Or another way of putting it. I live in a town with about 50.000 households covered by my ISP. I have 300/300 bandwidth. So if everybody had that and fired up their speedtest website, the ISP has to have 15Tb of bandwidth to my town alone, that's simply not happening. As you can see in the link above, the actual AMS-IX roughly has a 6 Tb/s throughput. 

Since they don't have this amount of bandwidth, the ISP has to deal with bandwidth management and they do this by something called traffic shaping. They have multiple traffic ques for different types of traffic, each having their own priority level. My ISP in Europe for example, they offer free VOIP between customers. You don't want this to be laggy, so this will be prioritized highest. Furthermore, the ISP's believe that a regular customer will simply spend most time downloading stuff, surfing the internet and watch streaming content etc. Their traffic shaping algorithms are optimized towards that. You can tell simply by the fact that download is much higher than upload on most residential connections. So while traffic is filling their traffic ques, the shaping algorithm decides what to send out and what to buffer. When the buffer is full, traffic simply gets dropped (the idea behind bufferbloat as often discussed on these forums)

Gaming traffic is UDP traffic. And generally is just one way traffic. One reason why a ISP likes to put UDP traffic in the very lowest priority que, is that when a packet is dropped it is simply ignored after, the sender simply sends the next packet. TCP on the other hand, sends a packet, awaits confirmation from the receiver and then sends the next. So if the original sender doesn't get this confirmation, it will simply resend the packet. This is why network operators choose to drop or delay UDP traffic. Once it's gone it's gone. TCP traffic will be resend over and over and if there is any sort of congestion issue dropping TCP packets will simply make this worse. 

Also, since different traffic has different priorities, you have to look at how ping is calculated in game or by a website etc. Is it physically sending a ICMP request, or does it do what sites like DSL reports do, send a HTTP get request and time how long it takes to get an answer? These things are all different. Point being here is that while you can have a great ping in game, it's a different traffic class than UDP gaming traffic. So while your ping might look great, your gaming traffic can be lagging all over the place since this is qued and buffered differently. 
When your traffic arrives at the backbone, largely the same thing will happen, your traffic is prioritized and gaming traffic is once again in the lowest tier. Every hop to the server will have it's own traffic ques and traffic shaping schemes. All the way up to the server complex.

So this lag comp people speak of? Following the above. Latency for UDP traffic can be very different than ping suggests but can also be more unstable due to buffering etc. What is more annoying, is that it can also be asymmetric. Since most ISP's provide asymmetrical connections, their traffic shaping model across their network will follow a similar model. What's happening when the famous "Lag comp is against me" occurs? Your real-time UDP latency on download is higher than on your upload to the server. If you have read the article about lag compensation at the start, it will be obvious by now. When this occurs, your traffic reaches the server faster than you are gettig the gamestate updates from the server. And thus you will appear at your enemies screen before they appear on yours. And they seem to shoot you in a nanosecond. Some players try to influence this by clogging their upload on purpose, so they delay upload to the server. 

Fine example of exactly this happening to me a few days ago:

You can see he was clearly not on the screen when I was taking damage.

This mainly why you get a different feel for the connection every time you play, or even from game to game or half way the game. You can control your own network, but next to you and the host, there is at least 3 other different parties involved who have a influence on the quality of your traffic. It makes me chuckle when some Youtuber connects up router A and afterwards router B and decides on feel that one or the other is better because he had a slightly faster hit detection in one of the games.

Also, when you are setting up your network, and follow the directions for setting up anti-bufferbloat, you're simulating a fully loaded internet connection. Most of the time when playing, this is not the case. When I play CoD and I have my DumaOS screen open, I generally have a traffic load of 0.5 Mb/s on a 300/300 Mb/s connection. Bufferbloat is absolutely not going to be an issue no matter what you set the sliders to. 

When is all this important? QoS and anti bufferbloat is simply important if you have a low upload connection, or better said low compared to your usage. On a connection with 10/20 Mb/s upload, a phone simply syncing can already congest your network. This is where you need to have your bufferbloat and QoS set up right. If you are using a 1000/1000 Mb/s connection this is of very little interest. QoS will do very little for you here. You read about people complaining that they are using 1000/1000 Mb/s internet and still have a crappy game. Thats simply because traffic coming from their network is simply still affected by traffic shaping between their ISP, backbone and server and this is not any different than any other connection.

Geofilter is the prime functionality for R1 and DumaOS routers for me. It simply makes sure that you are connected to the closest server. I measured ping across Europe. To Amsterdam I get 8ms, to Italy 28ms. If you were to have a game that was truly having 28ms latency, it would be perfectly playable. It's only that from Amsterdam to Italy, there is so many extra hops in the traffic route that the chance of you meeting over congestion is exponentially growing. As geofiltering limits your matchmaking, you have to find a balance here between connectivity and quality. Typically in Europe I have Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London in my filter giving 8-15ms ping. Paris for some odd reason gives 25ms and always has a lower game quality. 

I have friends that use R1 routers and mess about with the sliders every day and they can never get it right either. That's because it's impossible to get it right and it's all pissing in the wind. If you have a setting that gives you a clean line without bufferbloat, then you did all you can do and the rest is simply out of your hands.

Other settings? DNS, MTU? Is all BS. Set it to what your provider defaults and done. It's all snake oil. I swapped my XR500 for my R1 once to do some testing, forgot to update the connection setting in the PS4 and it was pointing to a non functional DNS adress. And the game ran fine. I only found out because I went to upload a video afterwards and it was coming up with DNS errors. So conclusion here is also it doesn't matter which DNS you use.

[CrossFitKila717]

12 hours ago, Bert said:

You will never get this totally right.

A Netduma router or any other router with QoS can only control traffic outgoing at your own network and there is stops. Netduma/DumaOS also have the option to use a geofilter to limit connections, that's where you get the major advantage over other brands.

First of all, there is no dedicated servers in CoD in true sense of the word. A true dedicated server is an actual physical server dedicated to running the hosting software and has it's own internet connection.  What we call dedicated servers in CoD is a program running in a cloud, this cloud has multiple access nodes  which all have their own traffic load, and the cloud itself is running numerous other programs requiring internet bandwidth and prioritization levels. So performance of the hosting/server program is reliant on total usage of the cloud it's running in and total bandwidth usage of the cloud. If you have ever seen a complex like this, my place in Europe is close to a Microsoft datacenter, and the place is massive. You're easily talking over 10 football fields long and wide, having over 25 warehouse sized buildings containing their serverpark. So you can imagine it doesn't get it's internet through a single UTP cable, there is multiple fiberoptic backbones coming in. It has actually happened that I was connected to the same server complex. DumaOS showed 41ms ping. Game finishes, next game loads, I am playing on another uplink on the same servercomplex and ping read 33ms. So we can already see that their servers themselves are inconsistent.

Before I continue, this is a good basis read:
http://denkirson.proboards.com/thread/5972/networking-lag-compensation-hit-detection
I think it's posted here before but it's a good foundation as to why there is issues and what is this terrible lag comp people on the internet talk about.

Traffic coming from your router doesn't go straight to the server, but first has to cross your ISP's network. From there it goes on one or more backbones owned by a third party. From there, it usually gets connected up to a internet exchange, a place where these backbones meet and a lot of high end serverparks have a very close connection to these places, or are directly plugged in. On every segment, the owner of the network sets his own traffic shaping and prioritization ques.

One of the largest Internet Exchanges in Europe is AMS-IX. For reference you can see how much traffic they process: https://stats.ams-ix.net/index.html What is funny here is that you can see exactly what peak time is for internet usage and peak load on the backbones and the network.

Beginning at your ISP. Your ISP is usually oversubscribed factor 100 to factor 500. They expect their customers to use their internet in bursts so they can sell the same bandwidth multiple times if you want to call it that. Or another way of putting it. I live in a town with about 50.000 households covered by my ISP. I have 300/300 bandwidth. So if everybody had that and fired up their speedtest website, the ISP has to have 15Tb of bandwidth to my town alone, that's simply not happening. As you can see in the link above, the actual AMS-IX roughly has a 6 Tb/s throughput. 

Since they don't have this amount of bandwidth, the ISP has to deal with bandwidth management and they do this by something called traffic shaping. They have multiple traffic ques for different types of traffic, each having their own priority level. My ISP in Europe for example, they offer free VOIP between customers. You don't want this to be laggy, so this will be prioritized highest. Furthermore, the ISP's believe that a regular customer will simply spend most time downloading stuff, surfing the internet and watch streaming content etc. Their traffic shaping algorithms are optimized towards that. You can tell simply by the fact that download is much higher than upload on most residential connections. So while traffic is filling their traffic ques, the shaping algorithm decides what to send out and what to buffer. When the buffer is full, traffic simply gets dropped (the idea behind bufferbloat as often discussed on these forums)

Gaming traffic is UDP traffic. And generally is just one way traffic. One reason why a ISP likes to put UDP traffic in the very lowest priority que, is that when a packet is dropped it is simply ignored after, the sender simply sends the next packet. TCP on the other hand, sends a packet, awaits confirmation from the receiver and then sends the next. So if the original sender doesn't get this confirmation, it will simply resend the packet. This is why network operators choose to drop or delay UDP traffic. Once it's gone it's gone. TCP traffic will be resend over and over and if there is any sort of congestion issue dropping TCP packets will simply make this worse. 

Also, since different traffic has different priorities, you have to look at how ping is calculated in game or by a website etc. Is it physically sending a ICMP request, or does it do what sites like DSL reports do, send a HTTP get request and time how long it takes to get an answer? These things are all different. Point being here is that while you can have a great ping in game, it's a different traffic class than UDP gaming traffic. So while your ping might look great, your gaming traffic can be lagging all over the place since this is qued and buffered differently. 
When your traffic arrives at the backbone, largely the same thing will happen, your traffic is prioritized and gaming traffic is once again in the lowest tier. Every hop to the server will have it's own traffic ques and traffic shaping schemes. All the way up to the server complex.

So this lag comp people speak of? Following the above. Latency for UDP traffic can be very different than ping suggests but can also be more unstable due to buffering etc. What is more annoying, is that it can also be asymmetric. Since most ISP's provide asymmetrical connections, their traffic shaping model across their network will follow a similar model. What's happening when the famous "Lag comp is against me" occurs? Your real-time UDP latency on download is higher than on your upload to the server. If you have read the article about lag compensation at the start, it will be obvious by now. When this occurs, your traffic reaches the server faster than you are gettig the gamestate updates from the server. And thus you will appear at your enemies screen before they appear on yours. And they seem to shoot you in a nanosecond. Some players try to influence this by clogging their upload on purpose, so they delay upload to the server. 

Fine example of exactly this happening to me a few days ago:

You can see he was clearly not on the screen when I was taking damage.

This mainly why you get a different feel for the connection every time you play, or even from game to game or half way the game. You can control your own network, but next to you and the host, there is at least 3 other different parties involved who have a influence on the quality of your traffic. It makes me chuckle when some Youtuber connects up router A and afterwards router B and decides on feel that one or the other is better because he had a slightly faster hit detection in one of the games.

Also, when you are setting up your network, and follow the directions for setting up anti-bufferbloat, you're simulating a fully loaded internet connection. Most of the time when playing, this is not the case. When I play CoD and I have my DumaOS screen open, I generally have a traffic load of 0.5 Mb/s on a 300/300 Mb/s connection. Bufferbloat is absolutely not going to be an issue no matter what you set the sliders to. 

When is all this important? QoS and anti bufferbloat is simply important if you have a low upload connection, or better said low compared to your usage. On a connection with 10/20 Mb/s upload, a phone simply syncing can already congest your network. This is where you need to have your bufferbloat and QoS set up right. If you are using a 1000/1000 Mb/s connection this is of very little interest. QoS will do very little for you here. You read about people complaining that they are using 1000/1000 Mb/s internet and still have a crappy game. Thats simply because traffic coming from their network is simply still affected by traffic shaping between their ISP, backbone and server and this is not any different than any other connection.

Geofilter is the prime functionality for R1 and DumaOS routers for me. It simply makes sure that you are connected to the closest server. I measured ping across Europe. To Amsterdam I get 8ms, to Italy 28ms. If you were to have a game that was truly having 28ms latency, it would be perfectly playable. It's only that from Amsterdam to Italy, there is so many extra hops in the traffic route that the chance of you meeting over congestion is exponentially growing. As geofiltering limits your matchmaking, you have to find a balance here between connectivity and quality. Typically in Europe I have Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London in my filter giving 8-15ms ping. Paris for some odd reason gives 25ms and always has a lower game quality. 

I have friends that use R1 routers and mess about with the sliders every day and they can never get it right either. That's because it's impossible to get it right and it's all pissing in the wind. If you have a setting that gives you a clean line without bufferbloat, then you did all you can do and the rest is simply out of your hands.

Other settings? DNS, MTU? Is all BS. Set it to what your provider defaults and done. It's all snake oil. I swapped my XR500 for my R1 once to do some testing, forgot to update the connection setting in the PS4 and it was pointing to a non functional DNS adress. And the game ran fine. I only found out because I went to upload a video afterwards and it was coming up with DNS errors. So conclusion here is also it doesn't matter which DNS you use.

First off, thank you so much for taking the time to write that!!! Awesome info & greatly appreciated. I’m one of those that’s always chasing settings, mainly with the sliders. So basically what you’re saying is as far as Duma settings, just find a good setting with the sliders, have PingPlotter running, do a speed test to saturate your line and whatever’s most stable, leave it there?

[Bert]

Yes exactly that. Unless anything changes at your ISP all the other stuff is simply outside your control.

[CrossFitKila717]

1 minute ago, Bert said:

Yes exactly that. Unless anything changes at your ISP all the other stuff is simply outside your control.

I PM’d you. 😎