Killzone: Shadow Fall Lag Fixes

Killzone: Shadow Fall Lag Fixes Outlined by Guerrilla Games

Following the first ‘Getting Rid of Lag’ article by Guerrilla Games about Killzone: Shadow Fall earlier this year, Lead Game Tech Jorrit Rouwe has given a new update today, revealing that the quality of your wireless connection may be a contributing factor to experiencing a ‘laggy kill’ (a kill that takes more than 0.5 seconds to register):

The reason for this is that radio interference causes data to get lost much more easily on a Wireless connection. When that data happens to be your headshot, it takes a little while before the data is considered lost and is resent. This adds a couple of tenths of a second, and when the interference lasts longer (because, for instance, your neighbors are streaming a movie on their wireless connection on the same Wi-Fi channel) this process can easily cause a kill lag of a couple of seconds.

To help fix this issue, Guerrilla Games has moved all servers in the US-East region to a new data center to help reduce laggy kills.

In order to improve lag overall, popular warzones like 24-Player Team Deathmatch will see 99% of EU/US players, 96% of LATAM/Australian/Japanese players, and 92% of the Asian players getting match within their own region. Then, “almost all of the remaining players end up in their second closest region.”

Looking ahead to the next patch (should be 1.11) for Killzone: Shadow Fall, they will add a Connection Quality Screen, which will measure these aspects of your connection to show you if it’s you who is lagging, or someone else:

• Nearest Server: This shows the country where the closest server is located. In-game this changes to the ‘Current Server’ which may be a more distant one if no players were found on the ‘Nearest Server’.
• Round-trip Time: Time it takes for a packet to travel to the ‘Nearest Server’ and back. In game this measures the round trip time to the ‘Current Server’ so may give you a worse score.
• Packet Loss: The amount of packets lost in transit. A good connection should have less than 1%. When playing on Wi-Fi this percentage is usually higher than when playing Wired.
• Download: The measured download speed in kilobit/s.
• Upload: The measured upload speed in kilobit/s.
• Connection: If your connection is Wired or Wireless.

As well in the next patch, “matchmaking will try to group people with similar connection quality to the server together as much as possible” and “the matchmaking server will now assign the party to the region where most people come from. Previously the region would be determined by the party leader.”

Past the details above for the next patch, Guerrilla Games is also working on the following to appear in the future:

• Clan Matchmaking – In the future we will be optimizing the matchmaking system further for clan matches, so that a match between a clan from the US-East region and a clan from Japan may be hosted in the US-West region if that results in the lowest total ping for all players.

• New server locations – We’re starting tests with a data center in Dallas to improve connection quality for players in the middle of the US. We’re also still investigating data centers in the Middle East, but unfortunately there are very few data centers there that meet our needs at this time. We are currently looking into a data center in Istanbul.

• Return to Own Region – If you ended up playing cross-region because there were no games available in your own region, the game will check for game availability in your own region again upon round rollover. If a game has become available in your own region you will be returned to your own region.

• More Information – We observed that most cross-region play occurs on custom Warzones where the player count is low. Currently we will only show you the amount of players that are in a custom Warzone, but in the future we will also display the amount of players that are playing in your own region. This will give you a better indication of the quality of the game.