are you idiot, mister jamon
I pinged myself while in a game, not while in channel. It also doesn't seem to matter when I play people in my geographic location, which suggests even though it's p2p, the server still has an impact. The only players i know from europe who lag are gleip and spb. And that's just because their ports are closed, literally no one else from europe has an issue. And when I play against sepi or alf, they aren't lagging. But I am. And for the last 2 years every single time an american player starts playing on the server, they quit shortly after because they have to forward their ports, and then they still lag. Not only that, but 80% of american players who started playing on lance's server, not only were their ports opened automatically, but no one was lagging. I don't have any real opinion on iL. I'm completely impartial when I say that he's done good work, but much more work needs to be done just to get the game functioning the way it's supposed to be. Never mind improving it. And it's common sense that one developer who works in his spare time and never has any, the game's management and development is at a sub-chronic halt. Why doesn't iL have people help him manage the server? And why would you have to forward port 6112 if the server doesn't handle the connection to your router in any sort of fashion? Is it not possible that the smallest minute detail or problem in this process could be causing problems? And i'm not jumping the gun to pointing a finger at the server. I've thought this problem was on my end for years. But after moving twice in a few months with three separate internet connections, carriers and qualities, and re-imaging my computer to an entirely different version of windows, with no hardware problems i think it's most likely on the program or server's end. I'm not sure which. I've also tried various versions of combat edition, including the current one, and ones i used when i didn't have this problem.
typing /ping, whenever you happen to do it, tells you your ping to the server im pretty sure, which doesnt matter at all once the game has started. typing /ping [player] tells you your ping to another player which might, sometimes, matter somewhat.
lance introduced upnp to war2.us which would help auto-open ports for players. war2.ru has upnp now too, though, and has for the last couple years!
hosting is an issue sometimes, but if you want to discuss it you should go back and read some of the previous discussions where it's been talked about so you can understand the problems better. basically to completely solve the problem some sort of "hole-punching" process would be necessary and it would be a project for a programmer to change the way games are hosted and so on. thats what tk gets mad about, that no one is hiring a programmer to do it, at least he knows what hes talking about when he rants