I won't be able to play with my buddy due to recent ping changes

April 4, 2020

Ever since a year i started playing tarkov with a friend of mine, we're both from Italy. A

His connection is very bad, and even though it's somewhat a temporary situation (he'll have to move out soon.. when the whole coronavirus situation will be over), with the recent ping changes we won't be able to play together.

His ping is usually under 250ms, which is the ping required for the server to kick you, but from time to time, during the match, he gets lag spikes that go over that 250ms mark. This, with the coronavirus situation and everyone staying home, started happening at least once or twice every evening. We did try to play yesterday, and as soon as it happened he was kicked out and lost all of his gear.

Let me explain a bit better: we're both from Italy. Italy, sadly, is not fully covered by fiber and the copper wires that we had before fiber and that provided everyone ADSL are very, very, very old and bad. Usually in cities internet providers usually end up giving everyone at least the minimum bandwith they have to provide by contract.

However it's not that easy to have a decent connection when you live outsite cities and where there are just a small number of houses, which is basically the case for my friend i play with. He's above the minimum bandwith required most of the times, but sometimes he drops below that. In the evening usually the situation with his line gets worse and ping goes higher and quite some spikes.

Now.. needless to say with coronavirus and with everyone staying home situation got worse for everyone, expecially for his connection and for people that live outside of cities in general.

After all this: don't get me wrong. Having a way to prevent chinese players to play on EU/US servers is great, for sure. But is really a ping lock the only possible way to do it? Woudln't it be better overall to have some sort of anticheat in the launcher that detects ping spoofing?

I mean with the ping lock those who have a bad connection like my friend just can't play at all until he ends up moving, which, again, is impossible to do with the current situation.

Is there really no way i can play with my friend again?

Edited April 4, 2020 by RyuBlade94

April 4, 2020

True, now i can't even play with my friend who lives in Melbourne, we all in the Sydney sever, and i'm in Wollongong, means i can't play with them even we live in the same country. Also there is not enough players in Sydney sever, every time when i try to start a round, it will take AT LEAST 15 MINUTES to match!! Things bad mate.

April 4, 2020

Evidently, this lag marker affects everyone differently, I was looking at a thread earlier that I completely disagreed with saying that it was a pointless fix, when it evidently necessary to prevent ping abusers. I feel an anti-cheat wouldn't necessarily catch this, but I'm not entirely educated in that field, so if someone is able to correct me then I'm all for it. In your case, I feel bad for your situation, but the only fix for you at the moment would be to maybe play something else temporarily? Evidently this is not ideal, because it puts you "behind", and I personally enjoy playing this game a lot as well. But at the time, it seems like the only thing to prevent you from losing loot (or your friend losing loot). I hope you are safe in Italy my friend, at the end of the day that's the biggest thing in my eyes. I'm sorry you're not able to enjoy the game to it's fullest currently