lichess.org
Donate

Prevent lag compensation at Ultra and Hyper Bullet games

Hi Thibauld.
Over the past few weeks lag compensation started creating serious issues at Hyper and Ultra games.Players with xtremely low ratings are able to beat higher level players and the whole user experience when you play against opponents who lag defeats the very purpose of playing fast(when you have>60 moves at 15 secs then this is not Ultra).
I understand and respect all your efforts for a wonderful experience but especially for Ultra and Hyper you could do some of the following:
Allow players set their desired level when creating a tourney(ie ability to create tourneys <1800 etc).
Have a setting that allows or bans players who lag in Ultra and Hyper mode.
Discontinue altogether lag compensation for these variants.
I understand the fair approach about lag compensation but it seems that perhaps in super fast games it is not applicable.
Thank you in advance

:-)
It's a disadvantage in time scrambles because there is no compensation if a person's time reaches 0. So for example if you have less than 0.15 seconds on your clock, and a ping of more than 150ms, you lose (seemingly even if you premove, though I may be wrong on that).
You'll know if this happens because you'll make a move and see it on your screen, but then your piece will jump back to where it was and you'll lose on time.
@seanysean It's actually usually an advantage in very fast time controls, since their opponent might just think they're playing slow rather than lagging, and play slower in response. (if you want to see my full explanation, you can find it here: lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/connection-strength-needs-to-be-more-visible)

I think a good solution would be to just limit the lag compensation in ultrabullet to something like 250 ms. So if you're lagging more than that, the maximum amount of time you get back on your clock is 250 ms. It's just ridiculous that in some ultra games each move takes 2-3 seconds to go through. It's practically blitz at that point.
@TheAnonymousOne Well, we can agree to disagree. The only time I ever end up significantly down on time is against laggers because to me it feels like they're playing slowly when they're really premoving.

The thing is though, this lag completely changes the nature of the game. Regardless of who's at a disadvantage, ultrabullet at 1500 ping is a completely different game than at 150. If you lag so much that the game is that different then you should stick to longer time controls, or fix your internet.
I agree with #4, playing against somebody with huge lag can be really frustrating as they often move way quicker than it seems they do.
This issue is made even more complicated by the fact that the Lichess servers are based in Europe, so some people in the world might have fine internet but be living so far away that their ping is unfixably high. I have this issue where I live, and while my internet isn't the greatest to ever exist, at it's best performance I'm usually over 250 on this site and I can't do anything about it.

This is indeed a tough problem to fix.
The people who don't experience high lag just don't understand... :/

This topic has been archived and can no longer be replied to.