What online multiplayer games play well over wifi/higher latency?
I’m thinking turn-based games may work okay in this respect, but which of those might you recommend besides Civ? Also what other types of games work better over wifi/higher latency than you might expect?
I know ideally you’d simply wire up your system to not have to fuss with either, but it’s not always an option in some circumstances.
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Some older online games have pretty good latency tolerance because they were built in an era before broadband was widely available.
Vanilla World of Warcraft, for example, has a ‘spell batching’ mechanic that helps to equalise things somewhat. You’ll need to play on a private server though because Blizz changed spell batching in Classic.
Payday The Heist cause the worse of a connection the host has, the easier the BS onslaughts on high difficulties get lol
Wi-Fi itself is not likely to cause issues. Incorrectly set up or in a highly dense area with a lot of competing networks you may see some issues, but due to packet loss not latency. If you are in an area where it’s legitimately a problem and not just PEBCAK then there are alternatives to both Wi-Fi and running ethernet cables all over the place, like powerline networking.
But on to ping itself, unless you’re on extremely high ping it’s so rare to find a game where it’ll be an issue. Competitive reflex based games like low TTK shooters, sure, though when I use to play tournaments in an FPS I qualified just above 300ms before the actual LAN events. Americans start crying at like 80ms which is hilarious.
Powerline networking is often limited by the fact that a lot of houses/apartments have multiple circuits and circuit brakes are the nemesis of powerline networking.
but due to packet loss not latency
packet loss inherently creates latency. packets must be re-sent (at the baseline cost of the additional ping latency to the other side) and your client is running with an out-dated world state. In addition, packet loss usually comes in bursts so you’re losing all packets for an amount of time.
I wouldn’t think that most WiFi setups in and of themselves would lead to much, if any, added latency. Wiring up your systems is always ideal in terms of reliability, but plenty of people (I’d bet most) game online via WiFi. I’d suspect that if you’re dealing with latency issues it’d be from playing on distant servers or some other bottleneck in your network.
One couple I regularly game with are on Starlink and I believe both their computers are on WiFi and lag is (generally) fine for them when playing action-survival games like 7 Days to Die, Ark, and Valheim. Their only issues are generally from when Starlink has a momentary hiccup.
Servers may be some of the issue, but the problem then is that a number of games, at least outside of MMOs, don’t seem to give much of a choice on that. Presumably they’re trying to connect to servers that should give a good experience, but… 🤷♀️
Regardless, the intent here isn’t so much to troubleshoot networking issues, as it is to find games that may handle less reliable/rougher network situations decently, as much as is really possible anyway.
Ah, yeah, playing on official or public servers is definitely gonna be a mixed bag in terms of location. I’ll admit I didn’t really consider that as I’m lucky enough to have a good group of friends with similar gaming interests, and we’re all within about 100 KM of each other. I just ended up building a server and self-hosting out of my home.
