A recently-published patent from Electronic Arts suggests that the company may be considering the use of artifical lag to help even the playing field.
There are many different types of online servers used in video games, though the two most common are dedicated and peer-to-peer. Both have their own pros and cons, but the latter, which involves one player acting as the host while the rest connect directly to them, is generally considered to be the worst of the two due to the huge advantages that can come from being selected as the session's host.
Given that the host's inputs do not need to be sent and received to a remote server in order to be processed, they're often able to respond much more quickly than other players. It's for this reason that many gamers prefer to play on dedicated servers, though the higher cost of doing so often leads developers to go down the peer-to-peer route instead. Thankfully, some have at least tried to come up with ways to minimize the host's advantage, as evidenced by a recently-published patent from EA.
The patent describes a system that would see artificial input lag used to ensure that every player's inputs take the same amount of time to process. The disclosure even goes as far as to reveal that this input processing delay would be 100 milliseconds, which, on a 60hz refresh rate display, equates to six whole frames. It also seems to suggest that this delay would be added to offline sessions too, in order to ensure that the gameplay experience remains the same regardless of whether players are connected to the internet or not.
Given that some gamers spend thousands of dollars on low latency displays with high refresh rates and expensive gaming mice to improve their reaction times, the idea of developers intentionally adding lag may seem like a strange one to some. It does arguably make things fairer, though, and competitive players can still gain an advantage from shelling out on better equipment as they'll be getting their images faster once they've been processed and returned by the host.
“To address input delay time-advantages, some examples according to this disclosure may build-in an amount of input processing delay to the game that would be experienced by any player playing the game, whether on a local game client device or a streaming client device interacting with a streaming system. For example, a game according to this disclosure may be configured to include an input processing delay of 100 ms, whether played in a streaming or non-streaming environment and regardless of gaming device or gaming setup.”
It's important to note that there is no evidence to suggest that EA is already implementing the system described in the patent, nor that other developers and publishers don't have similar systems of their own already in use (as some have speculated is the case for years). Even so, the fact that EA has filed a patent built around the idea of adding artificial input processing delays to its video games would seem to suggest that it's something that the publisher is considering, at the very least.
Tom loves adventure games and RPGs, but is also partial to a spot of FIFA from time to time.