Netcode Lag/Delay Test Reports

[Ironreaver]

@ Sabin  I'll prep my sad face yo....anyway its good data to gather when SNKP does decide to patch it.

So far tho BB and SF4 have the best online from my experience...UMVC3 is ok...lags alot more than it should.  KOF 13 will need a stable online to be taken serious.

I dont play MK9 but how is there netcode?

[Sabin]

Not great either, not as bad as KOF13 of course but still not SSF4 quality. I guess somewhere in the middle (closer torward SSF4 side, but not great.)

I wanna tip my hands off to Dream Cancel for writing the open letter. If you guys care about KOF13 lifespan, please, please post that article, retweet it, post it on facebook, blow it up. Check the front page!!

[R.E.L.]

Not great either, not as bad as KOF13 of course but still not SSF4 quality. I guess somewhere in the middle (closer torward SSF4 side, but not great.)

I wanna tip my hands off to Dream Cancel for writing the open letter. If you guys care about KOF13 lifespan, please, please post that article, retweet it, post it on facebook, blow it up. Check the front page!!

THIS ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Sabin couldn't be anymore accurate.  Get everyone you know involved!

[JennyCage]

MK9 has better netcode than KOF13?  Where can I get what you're smoking?  MK9's netcode is terrible despite two patches to address it.  Offline combos have to be completely retimed for online.  The delay is massive and it's wildly inconsistent.

Sabin, you've been posting a lot talking about how bad the netcode is, but is it possible you have some bad routers between you and the people you're trying to play against?  I play people thousands of miles away and the delay is very minimal.  The fact that you think MK9's netcode is better is incredible given my experience, and I was pretty big into MK9's online for a long time.

KOF13 does have desyncs though, but they may not be noticed unless you're in voice chat with your opponent.  This might be due to my friend's slightly unstable internet, but it exists in a way similar to GGPO or Kaillera.  To me it's very weird that there's Sabin-like experiences with unplayability and my/my friend's experience where it's the closest thing to GGPO without using rollbacks.  It's not like MK9 where you have to totally adapt your timings to perform online combos, and it's leagues better than Kaillera and 2002UM.

So where is the inconsistency coming from?  Are the connections peer to peer?  Are they routed through an Atlus server?  Something is obviously wrong, I just wish we could figure out what.  I hate seeing so many people disparage the netcode because it's causing people to not buy the game out of fear that it's bad, but it's not, at least when it works... trouble is apparently it doesn't work for everyone.

Edit:  Also is this something more common on PS3?  Maybe you guys should include a list of systems affected.

[nilcam]

Sabin is on 360; I'm on PS3. My experience has been very inconsistent, though a bit better than his. This may be because I have more tolerance toward lag. It's very hard to find 3 bar connections and that is the required connection for even almost-decent play. Far too often, 3 bar connections are still pretty bad. The few 4 bar connections I've joined actually turned out to be 3 bars.

The online experience needs to be smoothed out and tightened up a lot. If they can patch this game as effectively as XII was patched, the netcode could be very good. Hopefully all of the rumors of an impending patch are true.

[MC2]

PS3 player here.  I've found my online experience to be very....shall I say bipolar, leaning more to the bad side.  I played flawlessly with a friend in Virgnia once (although I lagged to hell just last night with the same friend) but had a mildly laggy experience with another in Florida.....I'm in Texas.

I feel like the netcode itself is flawed, but not horrible in any way especially compared to MK9 and the XBLA SNK titles.  And yeah the open letter is a great idea, and it's very professionally written an courteous, so I believe that SNKP/Atlus will be willing to consider the community's feedback further.

[nilcam]

I need to play you! I'm in Oklahoma City and have a good connection.

[johrjives]

My online experience hasnt been that good so far. Last night I played with a friend of mine in Edmonton. Edmonton to calgary is about 300 kms.  The netcode degraded the matches to pretty much footsies. Combos were hard to pull off and blocking on reaction was sometimes impossible

Thats a nice letter nilcam. Im glad to see Dreamcancel stepped up for the best interest of the community.

[Sabin]

MK9 has better netcode than KOF13?  Where can I get what you're smoking?  MK9's netcode is terrible despite two patches to address it.  Offline combos have to be completely retimed for online.  The delay is massive and it's wildly inconsistent.

MK9 has only had one patch for the netcode, and even then its still not as good as SSF4 level.  I'd say its around 75% of where SSF4 should be.If you've been following my stream at all you would see the connections that I have had with people with strong connections or fiber optics. I post my stuff on TestYourMight all the time actually, and if you check my archives for MK9 you can see I play people with varying sort of connection strengths.

Sabin, you've been posting a lot talking about how bad the netcode is, but is it possible you have some bad routers between you and the people you're trying to play against?  I play people thousands of miles away and the delay is very minimal.  The fact that you think MK9's netcode is better is incredible given my experience, and I was pretty big into MK9's online for a long time.

Just because I said it's better doesn't mean I think it's GOOD. You're getting hung up on semantics here. While I do agree it's still subpar, at least it's possible to play people from other regions altogether. With KOF13, not really possible. Again, it's possible that I can have a laggy router along a certain hop to someone but in order to figure that out again - we'd have to spend a day tracerouting stuff. Which would mean community effort with people overall, which is certainly something I've discussed with a few people.

Regardless of you blaming my setup, like I said before, I have yet to find one player worth their salt that will defend the netcode. You most likely won't. It's almost like people don't want to accept the reality of the situation

KOF13 does have desyncs though, but they may not be noticed unless you're in voice chat with your opponent.  This might be due to my friend's slightly unstable internet, but it exists in a way similar to GGPO or Kaillera.  To me it's very weird that there's Sabin-like experiences with unplayability and my/my friend's experience where it's the closest thing to GGPO without using rollbacks.  It's not like MK9 where you have to totally adapt your timings to perform online combos, and it's leagues better than Kaillera and 2002UM.

With input delay netcode, if the connection is unstable enough, no matter what, you WILL have to compensate your timing in order to land combos consistently. This goes for SSF4, MK9, and KOF13. The question is, how does the netcode handle said input delay and how does it mitigate it? Not asking for miracles but it can certainly use improvement.

So where is the inconsistency coming from?  Are the connections peer to peer?  Are they routed through an Atlus server?  Something is obviously wrong, I just wish we could figure out what.  I hate seeing so many people disparage the netcode because it's causing people to not buy the game out of fear that it's bad, but it's not, at least when it works... trouble is apparently it doesn't work for everyone.

Edit:  Also is this something more common on PS3?  Maybe you guys should include a list of systems affected.

Again, traceroutes dude. Over both systems. Yes when connection strength is strong, it works great. In a strong 3 bar connection even, the input delay is consistent (but manageable). Played BananaKen last night (someone who I also play in SSF4AE,) connection quality was worse for us compared to other games (but he then commented it's better than playing 3 bar ranked, lol.)

[Rex Dart]

Last night I actually played some games with players from Mexico. It was actually far more playable than I would have thought. There was input lag, but it was consistent enough that I had no trouble with my BnBs. It was clear that they knew how to KOF.

While I do hope for a patch to improve the netcode, I have to admit it occasionally surprises me with a good match experience.

[Bang_Em_Banks]

0k, so I been testing the Netplay live on stream "Brawler Up Tv" since day one and a quite a few times since after. I have played over 70 plus online matches with people very close & some rather distant. My connection is a wired connection, my download speed is 26.48mps, my ping is around 5ms, and my upload speed is 5ms. So I would say I have a fairly descent connection overall. Here is my verdict on what I personally think of the netcode as is.

  When playing individuals in my state literally a few neighborhoods over. We definitely had 4 bars versing each other. Though it was 4 bars, and we couldn't see any visual or feel any major lag in the movement there was indeed noticeable input lag & timing issues. For example, I was playing Terry and just doing his standing HP into  Hp into qcb LP a simple standard 4 hit combo and gateway to big damage stuff was much more difficult to perform. I often times found myself trying to mash it out and then just changing the timing of how it was performed offline all together. This was pretty frustrating as getting hit confirms overall online was blatantly more difficult & then when you finally get one you aren't able to simple combo consistently or you get punished for burning knuckle not linking and coming out late & being punished because it isn't safe on block. Also reaction times were a little more inconsistent too. Being able to block or correctly punish things you know are coming on reaction often times still resulted in damage taken which made both of us not want to bait things as much for fear of still being hit even in knowing.
  Now I realize online can never replace the experience of local versus nor do I expect it to, but these issues were pretty blatant and consistent among my overall experience so far. Note, there were times when deeper combos would magically work online all of a sudden, but it definitely wasn't a consistent thing at all. There were times when we literally stopped a match and said "let me try this on you" and things just weren't happening properly or consistently. This would also be the tale of the tape for playing individuals more distant, things would tend to be 50/50 in connections and playability overall. Realizing that obviously the farther apart you are & the difference in connections and such, the more room there is for lag and other nonsense to be displayed.  Even more distant 4bar connections would definitely suffer from slowdown, input lag, and such. This ultimately made for a not so pleasurable experience when trying to dig for a deeper much richer level of play. most of my matches I played turned into fireball fights and whiff punishing or punishing in general with  ex moves, supers,  and random supers being a very strong option. Strong combos and hd mode not even really being messed with at all, as it was just better to keep the bars for the occasional clean hit confirms into maybe, maybe not drive cancels and supers.
  The reason this is such a big deal is because KOF13 boast clean tight timing and rich deep combos on top of  spacing, positioning and honest punishing to really get things done properly. And none of it seems to be consistently achievable with the netcode the way it is. I would say the netcode is playable becuase you don't feel like you are suffering in movement and novice and scrubs wont really notice because the will rely on silly things to win most of their matches. But for those players who would really like to level up and play and get better are surely going to hit a wall sooner or later dealing with online.
My score for the Netcode is 6.5. it's descent and working in a basic sense, but it clearly needs work and the work it needs I believe to be very doable.
  All in all, KoF13 is amazing and is fun to play. It's very well put together and a game any fighting game fan should own and support. I'm really glad it got this kind of effort put into it from Atlus and SNK, I just hope for the sake of this title it gets some upgrade to it's online play. Since most gamers these days just go off of word of mouth/ hear say and nothing else.

-Good Luck!

Watch Brawlers Up Tv http://www.twitch.tv/bangembanks

[BiGGDaddyCane]

Good Shit on the Letter Nilcam 

[Mienaikage]

Noticed today that when a lagspike occurs the game doesn't try to sync up mid-match. It will remain however many frames behind it is until the end of that round :/

[R.E.L.]

Dear lord I hope Atlus hears us!  Just attempted online play.  This game needs it!  I don't want to see KOF die because of bad netcode! 

[Saitsuofleaves]

Okay, I have to ask, are people becoming braindead?

I ask for 3 bars or higher (mostly because I'll never get 4 bars...yeah, I is sad), and yet constant 2 bars and 1 bars show up.  I kick them, and the same people KEEP COMING BACK IN.

You'd think the first time would be enough!