It’s something every Call Of Duty player has experienced online – being shot at, running behind the nearest corner to evade fire and still dying. Cue the sound of fury, swearing and pads slamming into the nearest wall/pet/loved one.
Why does it happen?
We asked Mark Rubin, executive producer on Call Of Duty: Ghosts, that very question. He illustrated his point using two cans of drink and a serviette – check the original interview to see what we mean – but below we’ve tried to make his explanation as clear as possible without the aid of those items.
“Say there are two computers and a server,” explained Rubin. “I’m chasing you down and you go around a corner. On my machine, it looks like I’ve shot you. On yours, it feels like you’ve gone round the corner. The server is [closer to one player than the other].
“So you’re a certain distance away and I’m a certain distance away. I shoot, I send my packet to the server that I shot, you give your position to the server. The problem is [the computer that’s furthest away from the server] takes so much longer. The server is basically waiting, getting all of that information, sort of rewinding time to figure out who was where.
“Part of the problem is the further away you are like this and the further the disparity is, the server’s going to be like okay, well, this guy is so out of whack, we’re going to take the other data more seriously. We basically get a situation where it feels more like one client is winning over another client.
“It’s more about disparity than anything else. Our matchmaking will help with that and our dedicated servers should help with that as well. The way it works is if you’re near a dedicated server, you’ll basically prefer that as a host. It should always go to that server.”
Rubin went on to explain why this should be less of a problem in Call Of Duty: Ghosts, thanks to dedicated servers and a new match-making algorithm,