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Forum Discussion
Ping assist doesn't work.
I turned on Ping assist, set it to 60, and it still lets peers connect to me that are well above this threshold. What gives?
I've done pretty much everything to try and make it work. It worked for a moment and went back to the way it was.
After watching my geofilter while playing SFV for HOURS, it finally shows someone outside the radius with a triangle signifying a bad he is a bad ping. I think the problem is this firmware doesn't ping them more than once before showing results. Thus if the ping is below threshold the first time, it just assumes it is fine even if it fluctuates. What it needs to do is see the ping has gone over threshold and just block it after the fact. The router has no issue pinging multiple people, I cannot imagine it cannot see the ping has gone above threshold and thus deny the peer.
heroxoot wrote:
After watching my geofilter while playing SFV for HOURS, it finally shows someone outside the radius with a triangle signifying a bad he is a bad ping. I think the problem is this firmware doesn't ping them more than once before showing results. Thus if the ping is below threshold the first time, it just assumes it is fine even if it fluctuates. What it needs to do is see the ping has gone over threshold and just block it after the fact. The router has no issue pinging multiple people, I cannot imagine it cannot see the ping has gone above threshold and thus deny the peer.
While that sounds like a good idea, DumaOS doesn't block existing connections because we don't want the device to be used for cheating. That said, this would probably be a legitimate use of such a functionality.
Then my suggestion to you and the Net Duma team is to make Ping Assist poll 2-3 times before accepting a connection as okay by the assist. When you do a trace route in CMD it shows 3 pings for each hop. Do something similar before assuming the ping is good. Fluctuation happens but it's straight up letting high pings in often. I get people who will ping the first time as say 48, and then jump to 70ms and fluctuate heavily and stay way above my ping assist threshold. The entire reason I want to use this feature is because many peer to peer games poll once and then think the connection is "5 bars". I bought my XR450 to help games with poor matchmaking but thus far it has not done me much good. On a hardware level it's fantastic but the DumaOS has been a little bit of a let down over something like DD-WRT. GeoFIlter is the only real feature here that I bought it for.
Okay i've added that to the big list of suggestions. Maybe a slider between a quicker ping assist and a stricter ping assist.
I guess thats cool. My idea is more like, prior to connection if the ping fluctuates way too much out of range to just deny the peer. I understand why you'd say about cheating. Once you connect to them don't just cut the connection but rather within a set polling time if it goes above the threshold block the peer.
Example, Street Fighter V has a 15 second time frame to accept a match. If you make the assist poll 2-3 times within say 5-10 seconds, it can see the ping is bad and above the limitation set and put the bad triangle on it on GeoFIlter. Most peer to peer games have a long polling time like this for the player to accept the match, with the exception some shooters don't use a server and might poll similarly without the option to accept it.
Perhaps also consider making GeoFilter work for PC not based on game engine, but maybe by game clients. Steam, BlizzApp, Origin, etc. So far most games I play require me to add my PC as a console.
- I set my assist lower and it seems to do much better job. Set to 50 it has kept out more people who fluctuate from 60-100, but still let's people who are fluctuating from 50-65ish area in. I'm finding this more comfortable.
- Most likely the reason that is happening is because when it initially detects the ping, if it is within your range it will be allowed even if it then goes up after that. That explains why the ping range is sometimes 15ms above.
- That's why I suggested it ping the peer more than once. My router shows the ping as it fluctuates. I believe it would be easy for it to let it detect that a few times before making a decision. And if it fluctuates an higher than the set threshold after say 10 seconds it no longer will have the option to refuse. That way you can't expect it to kick people out of your game once it's underway.
As I said, many games have a short timer to accept matches when it's a peer to peer game like say, street fighter or Tekken. That should be plenty of time for the router to make the call on an unstable ping above the threshold. - It's a good idea definitely, Alex has made a note so hopefully the dev team will agree and look into it.
Found another problem when ping assist is enabled. Now it's blocking servers I already have in my allow list. All the Street Fighter V servers are in Oregon and have a high ping, like 100+. But I allow them so matchmaking can run in the game. Even with them on the allow list, a lot of times they show as a triangle, only to show I've named the server and allowed it when I ping it. Not an issue had with just using radius, however radius letting in anyone within it is worse in my experience.
This function is very odd and seemingly broken.
- That shouldn't be the case at all, are you 100% they are the same server? Servers are located in clusters in the same location and can appear to have a very similar ID but are slightly different.
- I thought it was clustered up and sometimes I see it is but there's a case where its just a triangle and when I click it the server is already allowed. It started doing it after I flushed the cloud. Doesn't se to be blocking it.
- If you delete it from deny/allow and then re-add it when you see it does it work properly then?
Well I can't always do that because another dedicated server for the game pops up on top and clusters it up. But I'll try it next time I see it.
Yes this fixed it. Now the server with the same ID shows as a circle. Guess it was just a bug. Very nice.
Also I'd like to say Ping Assist seems to work better as time goes on? I had to set it much lower to make it work better, like 40 threshold. But it just caught someone literally with a ping of 41 and denied it. Which is funny to me.
- Great to hear that, glad it worked. Well that's the idea, not sure why it would work better, perhaps it's the servers you're trying to connect to have a more stable ping so it detects the average ping better to start with.
Nevermind did not fix it. I turned on spectator and it shows without a circle even tho it's in the allowed list. I even tried rebooting the router.
- If it's in spectating mode it will allow regardless, not sure what you mean exactly?
- When filtered mode with strict is enabled, it shows as a triangle even tho it's allowed. When I turn on spectator it still doesn't have the circle. It just shows as a rectangle. I've removed and added it 3 times. Also I can't always click on it because the second it dents it another one I've allowed pops up and stacks on it. So I put it in spectator to make it allow so it doesn't get stacked on and it shows it's in my allow still. Do I need to delete, re-ping, and allow again? Before I pinged it, deleted it from the list, then clicked allow to add it back so I didn't lose it.🤔
- Are you able to get it if you zoom in a lot on the server position? If so then that might help you distinguish between them.
- No because they are stacked on top of each other. Zoom does nothing because the pings are in the exact same cords, as they are in the same place. Street fighter seems to have 4-5 servers for matchmaking in the US.
- Okay I think this is probably for us to test and try to get these servers whitelisted. I'll pass this over to the team.
It appears my geofilter was bugging out. I just flashed Initial stock, erased all settings, and let the router update back to .40. I initially noticed it bugging out when I left it to ping a dedicated server and the domain name kept changing to new peers showing up on the map, even tho it was still pinging the server.
Thus far geofilter has been nothing but a buggy mess for me. Hope it gets better.
After using the feature for a little while it just quits working all together. Radius does work fine but I get people with rather high pings around me as my areas is surrounded with rural parts and poor ISP. Wifi players are also prevalent to many games I play creating high pings. It worked for a few hours and now today it just does not work at all, and to get it working I had to downgrade and upgrade my firmware. Pings of 120ms in South America pop up on my screen and are given the okay to connect. I set my assist to 40ms and it doesn't even care. I don't think this needs an upper limit setting I think the whole damn option is broken and needs to be rebuilt. There is no way some of these peers started below 40ms when they are this far away.
I'm sure this won't get fixed anyway. I've seen a bunch of threads now about different things giving "suggestions" to devs and yet we have not seen a fw update since last year.
- We have identified some discrepancies with the feature and that is something we're investigating. I'd suggest you don't use PA at the moment as you're having issues with it and instead move your home location a little further away to prevent those rural connections and force different servers which may be more stable for you.
