STORY TIME! Let me take you back to November 2015. There was only one game on my mind at all times, day and night: Halo 5 Guardians. Granted, the campaign was garbage and the multiplayer was inferior to most of the earlier titles, but it was honestly the first Halo game that I made a determined effort to be good at (because I was a CoD fuccboi all through high school and college). I probably put about 100 hours into the game in those first two weeks and I was feeling pretty confident about my ability in the game. I think that first season I reached Diamond 5 easily and was right on the verge of reaching Onyx in most of the modes I played. Then, I made a change that absolutely wrecked my rank and took me from a high Diamond player to a low Plat, even Gold player.
You see after I graduated college, I didn’t spend a ton of my newfound money on anything special. I didn’t buy a new car or take a big trip around the world. I was raised to save as much money as possible and be smart with my purchases, which is why all the furniture I owned was bought used off Craigslist for under $400 (except my bed). In college, I purchased a 40″ Samsung LCD TV listed on Craigslist for $80. It wasn’t perfect, in fact, it weighed something like 55 lbs and was a pain in the ass to move, but it allowed me to move my Xbox 360 out of the fraternity house’s basement and keep it in my room. When I graduated, I didn’t even think about buying a new TV until suddenly in the middle of Halo 5 matches the TV would inexplicably turn off, sometimes costing my team the match. After this happened on and off for the first 2 weeks, I decided it was time to buy a new TV (actually my friends blackballed me from the group until I got a new one but hey who’s pointing the finger). I hunted the Black Friday sales and found a 48″ Vizio 4K TV on sale for $400, which I picked up the next day.
And that’s when it all started. I went from a 1.8-1.9 K/D to a 0.8-0.9 at the high ranks. My aim was all jacked up and no sensitivity changes would fix it. I blamed the TV change but my friends wouldn’t listen. I dropped further and further away from the upper ranks, and with it, I lost my Onyx/Champion ranked friends who refused to play with anyone outside the “Dream Team”. I was furious. There was a white-hot rage that burned with the fire of a thousand suns in my soul every time I picked up the game. I couldn’t understand why I was having so much trouble with my aim. I even tried switching back to my old TV for a while and saw slightly improved accuracy, but nothing close to those early weeks. Was my age finally catching up with me? That thought actually starting crossing my mind. Maybe I was too old for competitive shooters and my brain wasn’t capable of thinking fast enough anymore. Then one night, like a year later, I discovered my issue: latency.
Real quick for the non-techy readers (like me), let’s talk about what latency is in both technical and real-world terms. The technical definition for latency is “the discrepancy between the time delay of stimulus and response in the simulation as compared to the real-world equivalent”. And now, for those of us who have no fucking clue what that means, latency is basically just “input lag”. It’s the measurement of the time it takes for the console or monitor to register your actions on the controller. For example, let’s say that you press the A button to jump in a game. Ideally, you want your character on the screen to jump immediately when you press A, meaning your latency is 0 seconds. However, that is literally impossible; there will always be some sort of lag between a controller, console, and monitor because that’s how electronics work. But you want that number to be as low as possible especially for competitive multiplayer games. Let’s say you have a latency of 20 microseconds for your entire system (which is average). If you were to take that exact same player and put him/her on a system that runs at 40ms, they would struggle for a while. Why? Because their brain has been trained to play the game at that latency, just like we train our brains to play with certain in-game settings like sensitivity, aim response curves, etc. And that is exactly what happened to me when I changed TVs.
A year after my Halo 5 struggles, when I was absolutely obsessed with Overwatch, I looked up online how to get better at aiming with a controller. One of the recommendations in that YouTube video blew my fucking mind. I found out in newer TVs there is a “game mode” setting you can turn on that reduces the latency between the console and the TV. Why is that a setting? Why does a TV need a low and high latency setting? I have no fucking clue but maybe THEY SHOULD PUT IT ON THE BOX. So yea, you absolutely don’t ever want to fuck up your latency. But you know what’s worse? When your latency is inconsistent every time you press the button, as you can see in the Google Stadia test below:
Now listen, I have not had any first-hand experience with Google Stadia thus far. I also understand that the system is technically in “early access”. But guys, if this video is consistent across the board then Google Stadia is completely unplayable. Just last month Google was explaining how they were going to use this new concept called “negative latency” to improve the response time so that cloud gaming was even better than local systems. OK Google, but…what about just standard latency at launch? How long should players expect this input lag to exist? When your customers can play simple games like Minecraft on their 8-year-old iPhone but not on your brand spanking new console, that’s a big fucking problem. And dear god please don’t blame it on the internet connection. Could you imagine the dumpster fire that would happen if Google blamed everything on the internet connection? God, they would be kicked out of the market faster than my controller went through the wall in my final Halo 5 match. Hopefully, this is a simple fix because if not, Stadia could be buried well before it even has time to take its first breath.
Basically, what I’m trying to say with this post is…VIZIO RUINED MY CHANCE AT A COMPETITIVE GAMING CAREER DON’T LET GOOGLE RUIN YOURS!!!
