Who they ”choose to compensate and why” for lag is what’s changing. Treyarch picked players and hosts by geographical proximity with Black Ops 2, but that didn’t end problems.
The trouble is that being geographically near doesn’t override other more salient factors such as the network infrastructure itself that gamers are connected to.
”The coding for lag compensation - the basis of how it works - is going to be very similar,” explains Call of Duty YouTube notable, Drift0r. ”They’re going to tweak it, they’re working it, they want to make it very better and different but the core mechanics are going to be the same. However, who they’re going to choose to compensate and why, and especially the match-making properties, are going to be different.”
Some ISPs are rather poor at communicating where you actually are in the world, depending on where their local hubs are based and so on. The proposed tweaks to Ghosts’ netcode, specifically match-making, are to try and group players together with similar ‘cable length’ their Internet connection must travel through, rather than rely on geography.
Drift0r details the proposed changes in one of his latest videos. Hopefully this new method will yield better match performance and less ‘death by lag’ which continues to plague us like a swarm of locusts today. It’s 2013 already! We have freaking rovers on Mars with better match-making. Yeah I said it. Deal with it.
Call of Duty: Ghosts releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC November 5th. Xbox One and PS4 later.