Hi my name is Chris and this is Battle(non)sense
Today we will take a look at the netcode of
the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019 PC Beta.
As you surely know,
most Call of Duty games use both dedicated
game servers
and listen servers,
which many players falsely confuse with the
peer to peer network model.
During the time that I spend playing the Modern
Warfare Beta on PC
I always ended up on a dedicated server.
and based on what I’ve heard from other
players,
it seems like the beta used just dedicated
severs
and no listen servers.
which is a good thing,
as that eliminates all the downsides that
come with having a player host the match on
his PC.
But we have to wait and see is if that is
also the case when the game releases,
And if private or custom games finally also
use dedicated servers,
or if the developers continue to have one
of the players host these matches.
The beta also allowed crossplay between consoles
and PC,
however, I won’t dive into this here today
as there just wasn’t enough time for me
to test that during the beta weekend.
Another thing that I liked about the beta
was that, on PC at least,
the developers did not use those stupid signal
strength icons for your ping,
instead they show you the actual value in
millisecons.
That said, since the game servers respond
to ICMP
with the exception of servers hosted by vultr
I could easily find out that the values shown
in the overlay and the scoreboard
are false.
So that seems to be a bug that the developers
still must fix for the release version.
Also, while I said that I always played on
dedicated servers,
I could still see the IP addresses of all
my teammates,
as the voice over IP solution seems to use
Peer To Peer.
And I could not stop the game from doing that
even when I disabled the Voice Over IP feature
inside the menu.
Now while I really like that the game shows
ping values
and not those silly signal strength icons,
I am very disappointed that the game does
not have any warning icons to make the player
aware of issues
that his connection to the server is suffering
from.
Like a high ping
latency variation
or packet loss
as well as an icon which tells you that the
server is having an issue.
What makes this so frustrating is that the
Call of Duty World War 2 beta had such icons
but these vanished after the beta
and did not show up in Black Ops 4 either.
It is very sad that the developers do not
want to tell the player the reason behind
why he is having a bad experience,
which would allow that player to actually
do something about that.
Even if you don’t like DICE or Battlefield,
You must give them credit for providing players
with the information required
to track down why they have issues in the
game,
very few developers put in as much effort
as DICE does.
They even provide a damage log now
where you can see how much damage you took,
Who inflicted that damage
and at which server tick that damage was inflicted.
If you ask me,
every game should provide that much information
to allow players to figure out what is going
on
or what is going wrong.
That would even help the developers,
as they can then point at these warning icons
in gameplay footage
to explain why the player experience an issue.
Then I had a look at the bandwidth useage
And while game modes which put more players
on the server need more bandwidth,
I think that most players won’t run into
any issues here.
Now how about the tickrate
and the update rates.
Once again,
the developers decided that Wireshark is a
bad application
and so the game simply shuts down,
as soon as you launch Wireshark.
I have no idea why they are still doing that
as it is very easy to get around that
and then use Wireshark while the game is running.
So the argument that this is an anti-cheat
measure,
is a weak one as even I can easily bypass
it.
So, with Wireshark I could see that in Domination
the gameserver sends 62 packets per second
to the gameclient,
and the gameclient sends 64 packets per second
to the gameserver.
Which means that the gameserver is most likely
running at a tickrate of 62Hz.
The spikes that you see in the send rate of
the server is where packet splitting occurred.
This is when one update is so big
That the server has to split the data of that
update across multiple packets
to get that update to the gameclient.
Packet splitting is an issue
as the entire update is destroyed when you
lose just one packet containing a part of
the update.
That is also related to the issue where you
receive the damage of multiple shots in one
update, also known as super bullets.
However,
based on my tests packet splitting occurred
very rarely in the Domination
and Domination 20 game modes.
Then I had a look at the new Ground War gamemode
where you have 64 players on a single server.
In that mode the average server send rate
was down to just 24 packets per second,
and most updates were split across multiple
packets.
So not only does the lower server send rate
increase the network delay,
Minor packet loss can easily turn into a big
issue, because of the large number of split
packets.
But how good or bad is the delay between 2
players,
when each player has a ping of 28ms to the
dedicated game server.
In Domination I measured an average damage
delay of 98.6ms
an average gunfire delay of 106.2ms
and an average movement delay of 109.8ms
In Domination 20
where I noticed more packet splitting than
in Domination
the average delays increase a little bit
but not much.
Then in Ground War
where you have 64 players on a single server.
I measured an average damage delay of 136.4ms
An average gunfire delay of 152ms
and an average movement delay of 155.8ms
So, the lower server send rate and so the
lower tick rate
has quite an impact on the delays that players
are subjected to.
However, when we compare these results to
my last test of Black Ops 4,
Which also runs at a tickrate of 60Hz
then it is obvious that the network delays
in this beta are much, much worse.
The delays that you get in the normal multiplayer
modes of Modern Warfare,
are nearly as bad as those in Blackout.
And the Ground War mode is even worse than
that.
Compared to other games,
the results of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare
2019 beta don’t look any better.
Now if you have played the beta then you might
wonder why you did not feel that delay.
Thing is, when you are the one shooting at
other players,
then you get an almost immediate response
from the game,
as the game favours the experience of the
shooter.
It’s not that hard to make a game feel responsive
and great for the player who is pulling the
trigger.
The issues start to occur when you are the
one who receives the shots.
and if you have played the beta then you surely
died behind cover
or wondered why in the killcam you sometimes
did not fire a single shot,
even though you fired at least 5 shots before
you died.
These way too long network delays contribute
to what is causing that infuriating experience
when you are on the receiving end of a shot.
But to be fair,
A bad connection to the server can also cause
these issues.
Yet since the ping values were broken and
the developers decided to not use network
performance icons to tell the player when
his connection to the server has an issue,
players don’t know why they have a bad time
while playing the game
and so they will always blame the game first.
I really don’t know why the developers are
so against providing players with that information,
as that would also help them,
since they can point at these icons when they
see gameplay footage and say that this issue
occurred because that player had a bad connection
to the server.
Sadly, I did not manage to test the lag compensation
during the beta weekend.
honestly it was very exhausting to get the
network delay tests done as my test players
constantly got killed while I was trying to
complete these tests.
That said, based on the previous Call of Duty
games
and my experience in the beta,
I expect to see this game also heavily favour
the experience of the shooter when I am going
to test the lag compensation after the release.
So I’m really looking forward to the final
version of this game,
not just to see if the developers fixed some
of the problems that I’ve noticed
but also because I did enjoy the beta quite
a lot,
especially the guns and the movement felt
great
the time to kill could be a little bit slower,
but that’s just me.
And that’s all for today.
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have a nice day
and take care,
my name is Chris
and this was Battle(non)sense
