Eagle-eyed Call of Duty players noticed something had changed between the Black Ops 4 beta and final release. The main multiplayer just felt a little off with a rise in the number of traded kills in head to head and the game leaning toward whoever got the first shot off too much. After some investigation and posting by several people, it was determined that the multiplayer’s server tick rate, the number of times per second at which your console and the server will compare notes on the game, had been reduced from 60Hz to 20Hz in multiplayer.
After a lot of anguished nail biting and angry forum posting, Treyarch responded last night:
We’ve also noticed a lot of discussion around network performance over the past couple of days and wanted to take a moment to address this directly. We’re constantly working to optimize the game, and particularly network performance, to ensure the highest quality online experience for our players. For a game launch with as massive a population as ours hitting so many global servers at once, we configure our infrastructure to ensure game stability as the highest priority over all other factors.
Now that we’re past the initial launch of the game, we are focusing on fine-tuning network performance around the globe, using the real-world data that we have collected. Over the course of the next two weeks, we will roll out several updates to our network setup that will continue to improve upon the experience of our players since launch. As we have always said, launch is just the beginning, and we’re committed to making Black Ops 4 the best-supported game we’ve ever delivered. This is a journey that will involve constant adjustments, improvements, and additions. We appreciate your continued support and patience – thank you!
In other words, they put overall server stability and capacity – a server can run more instances of a game at a lower tick rate – ahead of absolute network performance.
Now, why is this important? Well, it’s because of the things mentioned above. It adds an artificial layer of latency and inaccuracy to a game that’s inherently reactions based. While your console is updating the servers 60 times every second, your game is only getting updates on other player actions 20 times, meaning that your game and the server are having to reconcile two ever-so-slightly different versions of events. That can mean the server is receiving both consoles saying that their player got a kill with a larger margin of error, more often resulting in both players getting the kill.
It’s not panacea for these kinds of traded kill – a common complaint in online games is that someone with a higher ping can get more kills because the servers are more lenient with their timings – but it’s a step that helps to mitigate the problems.
However, it’s not all bad news. The Blackout beta had only been running at 10Hz, leading to a lot of people complaining about fuzzy and unfair feeling deaths and encounters. Treyarch took that on board and, while multiplayer dropped to 20Hz, Blackout jumped up to 20Hz.
Hopefully they can start to bring the tick rate for all modes up in the near future. Blackout could certainly do with a dynamic tick rate that increases as you reach the end of a round.
Source: Reddit
