What is Peeker’s Advantage?
Peeker’s Advantage has always been an intriguing topic to me. It was that interesting combination of computer science mixed with my video game experience.
For those who don’t know, Peeker’s Advantage is something that has been plaguing multiplayer video games forever now. The term specifically refers to one person “peeking” another person in FPS games, where the “peeker” can see the other person for much longer than the person who’s sitting still.
Naturally, this small split-second advantage might seem tiny, but for skilled players, it converts into a consistent victory for them in every fight. Even for more normal players, this can give them an edge on average, giving them more victories than they might normally get.
Why does it happen?
For most people, they might not even realize that this is a problem that is mostly out of the hands of the developers. The problem lies in the physical realm, a problem with how the internet works, and there’s nothing we can do to completely fix that. In multiplayer games, we rely on sending and receiving the information of what we are doing (and what our opponents are doing) to the server and back. Because of how far apart players are, there is an inevitable lag that occurs between our opponents sending the information to the server, the server processing that, and then sending it back to us. All of this takes time, even if it is just in milliseconds, and all that adds up to giving the peeker the advantage in the fight.
In short, due to the travel time of the data over the internet between the players and the server, it gives the player who is “peeking” the advantage as they have more time to react as they see the other player before their game client even recognizes the peeker’s movement.
Is there anything that can be done?
There’s not much that developers can do to combat this problem in its pure form, however, there are plenty of issues that are server-related that compound this issue. Those are the things that can be tackled.
For example, we can up the tick rate of the server. Tick rate is the frequency at which a server processes the updates (the middle part of our chart before). It is typically measured in hertz (Hz). The higher the tick rate is in hertz, the faster a player will receive updates on inputs from the server which helps make the online game feel more responsive. The lower the tick rate, the more abusive Peeker’s Advantage will be.
Furthermore, developers should limit the max amount of ping a player can have. There have been countless cases of players abusing ping by playing on servers overseas, instead of their own, to maximize the abuse of Peeker’s Advantage.
Peeker’s Advantage is something that developers have been trying to tackle for years now. It’s something that every player will complain about, yet not realize that it isn’t something that can be completely eradicated. However, there are definitely steps for developers to help alleviate the pain that comes from this, and this is where they can hopefully create a game that minimizes the advantages that come with ping. Their best bet is to help explain why it happens to the community. Then hopefully bring down the advantage from ping to its purest form, the lowest time, in ms, it takes for information to travel from one player to another.
