I want to make a rant, but I need to make sure I have my facts straight first.

Two questions that I need someone who knows for sure how the game works to answer:

1. Is there 500 ms of lag/ping built into the game? Meaning that any ping below 500 has no effect on the game.

2. The way you check who is lagging is by pressing F11 and not looking at the ping, (unless it is 100+ above 500) but looking at the behind column and seeing who is positive when lag happens, or just generally if someone is spiking really high behind numbers. That is the best indicator of who is lagging the game, right?

Thanks in advance.

That's correct, although I think even 501 ping immediately becomes a problem.

You're best off checking ping using this:

Note that before you rant about it, it is an engine limitation. I can highly recommend you to look at these:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z0aUEBp_Os
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwLW6CjswxM&t=1401s

In particular, the first twenty minutes of the first video.

In this engine there are several steps that run sequentially but are computed parallel based on the previous input:

• (1) take into account input
• (2) compute collisions and pathing then execute lua
• (3) visualize everything

Each step ideally takes less than 100ms. It is sequential because we require step (1) before we can compute (2). It is parallel because we can compute step (3) based on the previous ticks version of (2), etc.

A consequence of lowering it means that the game becomes 'stuttery', with a mystery 11th tick. This was often the case for solo games, as half a decade ago we removed this delay for single player. Single player is a lot smoother now. I suspect the reason for that tick is because of the lock step feature.

Let alone that balance drastically changes when we lower it

alas, all of this is based on a years worth of experience working with this engine

500ms is still a reasonable minimum delay for FAF since the playerbase is scattered around the planet with the worst PCs and connections possible. Time spent on computation should be virtually nothing compared to the delays introduced by networking. In a 60fps game you only get 16ms to compute everything and render a frame, and 60fps is starting to be considered substandard now.