You guys are talking about ping when you should be talking about how anti-lag works and how it’s tuned. So we are going to assume there is not super high latency (300+), rubber banding latency (constantly going up and down regardless of your ping) and packet loss (ping could be low but you still chunk all over the place) for the rest of my post.
Lower ping is always favored but there are situations where a higher ping player will see you on their screen and you will not be around the corner yet. The anti-lag will typically favor the shooter in all situations so in most exchanges the lower ping player will have a slight advantage in who exchanges first. However, the anti-lag does it’s best to even things out to erase the ping advantage an try to give a game a LAN feel. But in some situations, like going around a corner, you might still due to favoring the shooter (which can happen with a high ping player shooting a low or vice-versa).
Compared to a game like OW though the anti-lag is pretty tight in DB by comparison. Also your body has momentum on death in DB and due to camera latency your body sometimes shows you placed further beyond the wall than when you really were when shot. I’ve frame by framed this a ton on my own videos and a good portion of the time I died as I was just getting around the corner but the game shows my death a bit further in to the movement.
So that’s kind of a bug with DB that lets people think they die around corners more than even the anti-lag allows you to. And I also don’t mind dying when I do go around a corner sometimes as well because if both of us had an even ping I still would have died…their screen doesn’t change in that scenario. We could both have been on LAN and I’d still die in the exact same situation. And it also doesn’t bother me because anti-lag suddenly doesn’t make a 70 ping equal a death sentence in most modern games (it was in vanilla Q3 and RtCW). Hell, 120 ping is now pretty playable to the point that teams pickup EU/NA players and have few issues.
That’s another thing. If the game favored high ping players all NA DB teams would be picking EU servers only and EU players would be picking NA servers only. Which is empirical evidence that refutes the commonly stated, “high ping gives me an advantage”. High ping in DB doesn’t give you an advantage. It’s just not a death sentence due to how anti-lag works. It simply tries to let you play like you normally would when you have a better ping. I highly recommend looking up GGPO and how it works with fighting games to better understand these systems since FPS games use similar anti-lag tech.
Anti-lag tech is hard to understand due to the extremely small window of time it uses, the delays it uses and the tuning devs can use to favor one situation or another, one weapon over another etc. So it’s often misunderstood or completely ignored when talking about “pings” in video games. Anti-lag has it’s downsides but it also makes games playable by a broad range of people over a geographically huge area assuming there are no network issues between those areas (see Australia/NZ connections to Taiwan right now).
