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Online ping monitoring

In competitive gaming circles, having greater than 30ms difference between teams on a server was ruled an "unfair server", so it is interesting to read the truth about pings in the online MW2 experience.

The truth was supposed to be that the IW.net experience was going to be far superior than the one getting on dedicated servers. Far from it in my opinion. Now we have some numbers to back up that opinion.

SarahB on IW's official forums (source) has given us all a way to better monitor your online ping. Here is her technique:

Navigate to the folder: 'program files\steam\steamapps\common\call of duty modern warfare 2\players' and open the file config_mp.cfg

Change scoresping_interval from 100 to 20, and maxbars from 4 to 10 (10 is the max).

This means that each of the 10 bars represents 20ms, with full green being 20ms or lower, and 1 red being 200ms or higher.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/6871/ihost.jpg

WHAT HOST ADVANTAGE LOOKS LIKE: http://img52.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=hostadvantage1.jpg

The sad truth? You might wanna pound a few beers before you read this:

• The host is immediately obvious, he's the guy with 0-20 ping (full green).
• I usually connect with about 101-200+ms.
• Most people are connected at 200+ms (3 or less bars on normal cfg settings).
• On regular cfg settings, 4 bars means up to 0-100 ping, 3 bars 101-200, 2 bars 201-300, 1 bar is 301+.
Hosting Issues

Note that the maximum players you can host apparently depends on your upload speeds. From [3rdArmy]CW-4, who found this in a dvar dump (thanks Garetjax for the heads-up):

band_12players "384k"
band_18players "580k"
band_2players "64k"
band_4players "128k"
band_8players "256k"

The "580K" refers to the upload speed. Just FYI, most of you out there have 384k.