There is a ‘skill-issue’ from network lag for players like me who are far from the Torn servers (in southern hemisphere). Assuming servers are UK-based the two-way latency chart I'll attach below shows modelling of the best-case average optimal round-trip times from 10ms (near UK) to 700ms+ (Oceania). Real-world delays are often worse due to local connection issues. Cloudflare may help mask this a bit, but distant players still get wrecked in time-critical mechanics. Some players/factions use external dibs systems like Discord bots (for fairness and wasted reduction), but the impact just gets moved to an external system. Avoiding latency-dependent mechanics becomes the go-to sanity preservation technique over time.
![[image: i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/JZeT0qX.png){kind=link}
Examples of latency impacted mechanics:
- Hospital stalking: (try and get that juicy bounty or war hit in)
- NPC fights: (can you get all 25 hits in when spam clicking on attack? I often cannot—let alone make multiple attacks)
- War pushes: (delays: attacking, hitting, swapping load-outs, taking meds, or new-target finding)
- Muggers: low-latency muggers are more successful and get first pick of targets
- Competitive buying/bidding for the best deals
- Spam clicking or script use (from frustration with all this? bot hunter to the rescue)
Devs, what priority do you give to making the game fairer for remote players? Moving servers just shifts the problem. With no insight on the challenges or what has already been done, could solutions like multi-region servers, client-side prediction, lag compensation, or turn-based mechanics help? A public debug page showing stats like round-trip times and server latency, with options like regional server preferences, could let players optimize if that were possible. I think some related efforts were made over the years (eg making the attack/hits limited to 1 per second). Is there any discussion on what if-any was done on this so far?
I actually don’t expect much to come of this posting, perhaps the chart will be interesting to some. I used to subscribe but now I am as active on money contribution as the progress on this fairness issue. Of course I realize those who benefit from the latency differential will not be happy with any changes to these mechanical imbalances.
Fun note, while writing this, my session hit the Cloudflare bot check in the middle, fortunately it returned and preserved most of the text, but just dropped my title off --it happened before I had hit post)