Bad connection with Wi-Fi

@ymr4c I can't claim my situation is universal, but what I have experienced is:

Whenever I play on wifi, 1v1s are fine, and 2v2s are generally okay, but 6+ player games tend to lag.

And when I play using a wired ethernet cable, that doesn't happen.

That's happened to me on this computer at more than one location, with different internet service providers and different wifi routers.

Maybe you could try connecting with an ethernet cable and see if that fixes your problem.

Ideally the devs would figure out how to fix this. I've never heard an explanation for it. It's definitely a real thing because it has happened to me . . .

I mean in a 1v1 you’re only sending data over a single connection whereas in a 6v6 you’ve got 11 other people who you’re exchanging data with. Plus there are 6x as many people issuing commands which means each connection is transferring about 6x as much data. Multiply those two numbers together and you need about 66x as much bandwidth for a 6v6 as you do for a 1v1.

Also check out @Geosearchef’s post on how the p2p nature of SupCom affects connectivity: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3288/but-what-the-heck-is-the-ice-adapter

WiFi speed doesn’t matter at all when it comes to online gaming, the size of the data being sent is so tiny. What matters is packet loss. Get Ethernet if you have high packet loss.

Or better wifi connection. It's not just about having fast connection but more about how stable it is, which won't show up with just plain upload and download speed. As someone who played on WIfi for a long time and streamed faf tournaments just fine I can tell you that Wifi is not the problem in itself, but rather it's quality.

@randomwheelchair

If you have high packet loss it’s almost always the distance from the PC to the router, upgrading the WiFi speed usually won’t fix the problem

And what did I write? I wrote that the speed alone is worth jack shit if the quality of connection is not good. That's why I said better wifi connection, not faster.

Has the nvidia bug been fixed with the latest patch?

@RandomWheelchair @Zeldafanboy
I mentioned my Wi-Fi speed is stable. I play competitive online games – R6, Valorant, AOE4 — a lot and have no ping or packet loss issues. It’s not about Wi-Fi quality. Getting Ethernet connection now would be a little troublesome and I'm not sure I wanna do it just to play SupCom once in a while. So I wanted to explore other options first. But thanks for the replies!

In that case it honestly might be just your ISP routing to other faf players that is screwed somewhere along the way.
You'd have to go and check it out with other players than your friends.

just use cable! as my understanding is SUpCom doesnt need super fast internet, it needs super stable internet. Otherwise you fall behind in data. a 300 ms ping isnt that bad if your con stable and better than a 40 ms unstable con. (most times high ping is indeed an indicator for unstable con, but it dont have to) I had the same problem, 1v1 worked okay the rest was lagfest. faf works peer to peer not over server, so minor unstabilitys which you wont recognize in other games mean you are 1 to 3 behind in data in faf.

cable is always better than wifi, you can have the best wifi router and your pc 30 cm away from the router, a 1,95 $ ethernet cable will still beat your 500 $ wifi setup.

The game checks every tick every player and the game does not proceed till everybody got checked. Its different to shooter-like games, there the server assumes when you move in one direction, that will do also while you lag a little and you wont realize. i dindt understand this in the beginning, my wifi works fine for shooter, but i was always lagging in sup com (sorry to everybody who played with me 7 months ago) Now i got cable and everything is fine.

also sup com calculates a lot more than other rts, projectiles are traveling trough space and time in real time, ballistics have to be calculated, may there be an asf in the way of an arty shell? is the nuke getting cock blocked by sattelite? it seems a little over enginiered sometimes, but its what makes this game so big. just try it out with cable at least.

as i said this is my understanding, it may be wrong, but cable solved all my problems.

@poop_dynamics said in Bad connection with Wi-Fi:

cable is always better than wifi, you can have the best wifi router and your pc 30 cm away from the router, a 1,95 $ ethernet cable will still beat your 500 $ wifi setup.

Cable is the way to go, but just saying, wifi over cable is pretty reliable too ;). (actually more reliable if you're abusing an old copper cable for ethernet)
Also, please don't put your PC 30 cm away from the transmitter, the polarization might cause you not to get a signal, you should keep at least 1-2 meters of distance.

@askaholic said in Bad connection with Wi-Fi:

I mean in a 1v1 you’re only sending data over a single connection whereas in a 6v6 you’ve got 11 other people who you’re exchanging data with. Plus there are 6x as many people issuing commands which means each connection is transferring about 6x as much data. Multiply those two numbers together and you need about 66x as much bandwidth for a 6v6 as you do for a 1v1.

FA bandwidth requirements scale linearly with player count, they are symmetric. There are 10 ticks a second, each tick you send and receive two packets with each other player. One is 25 byte, the other is 35-70 byte. Total bandwidth requirement for a 6v6 is ~1.2 Mbit/s down, 1.2 Mbit/s up.