Can players cause lag on purpose?

Militan1404

Sometimes when im dueling and right before im about to win the game lags out and i cant switch bar or use some of my skills, so i wonder if it is just bad timing or maybe that its possible that player do that on purpose to bye some time?

runagate

http://makezine.com/2009/02/20/lag-switch-how-some-gamers-che/

[edit[

makezine wrote:

A lag switch is a device that causes a network disruption during online gameplay to the benefit of one of the players. As the video above shows, it can be made with a dollar’s worth of parts and very little technical proficiency. From the Wikipedia entry on online game cheating:

By attaching a physical device (called a lag switch) to a standard Ethernet cable, a player is able to disrupt updates/communication from the server with the intent of tricking the game server into continuing to accept client-side updates (which remain unimpeded). Since the client game-player is impeding the reception of information download, on the client game-player’s side the opponents will slow down or stop moving, allowing the client game-player to more easily shoot them, block them, out-race them, etc. From the other players’ perspectives, the person using the lag switch may appear to be teleporting, invincible, having delayed animations or fast-forwarded game play, or the player may simply find themselves losing to an invisible opponent.
Though I’m not a gamer, I found this cheat to be particularly interesting since it abuses the very mechanism that’s supposed to make gameplay fair and smooth for players with differing connection speeds. The hack essentially interrupts the Rx pair of the ethernet connection, while allowing the Tx pair to continue transmitting. The game is designed so that in a normal lagging network scenario you can shoot at other players in the location where your game client perceives them to be. Otherwise, you’d have to be predicting the future, aiming at where the other player will be seconds from now when their network packets finally arrive. Shut off only the Rx pair, and your game client can only interpolate the location of the other players; they effectively stop. With the Tx pair still active, your client is still able to send collision events to the server, making your opponent dead (and you a cheater).

This is part of the reason you see organized trains of zergs running back and forth at the edge of a subzone like the area just past the field of fire in front of Sej. They are lagsploiting, trying to cause opponents to crash as the server, for some reason, preferentially accepts their specifically-timed actions. Oftentimes the pugs involved don't even know why the exploiting pvp guild leaders are doing this.

It's also why you lag when you go from the wayshrine to the DC undaunted enclave - right around where the door/archway is there's a subzone boundary and you'll notice your mount slow there. This is especially egregious if people are dueling or spamming skills for no reason there. For some reason since they're already there it doesn't affect them the way it does you.

Now this is compounded many times over if someone's trying to log into and overcrowded place like, say, Rawlkha or Belkarth on a weekend when the server is already having problems, and your request to load in all that data in the zone, with realtime changes, is much more likely to fail and prevent you from logging in than it is to affect those people already there.

Militan1404

Thanks, that explain a lot:)

SirAndy

There's an older video on youtube of a sorc lag-streaking though the air for miles ...