Edit:

Do not listen to VyperXXX, as he said himself, he has NO IT experience.

Spooky is exactly right.  Demigod performs nearly identical to Supreme Commander when it comes to ping and latency issues.  Anything under 350 is going to be fine.  Even 400 should be fine.  It's not the ping that is the issue, its how stable a ping is.  If someone has a ping of 150 but it isn't stable, and it spikes all over the place, you are going to have stuttering. 

Spooky and myself have been playing supcom since '07 and this rule held true there just as much as it holds true in Demigod.  Ping is almost meaningless.  It's all about whether a player spikes or not (or has a low end pc with a low sim speed!).

You're...not the sharpest knife in kitchen I see.

Citation needed

Every time I've played with someone that had a ping over 250 at the lobby screen, that person either had HUGE lag spikes or dropped during the game.

300+ pings might be playable in theory, but never have been in the games I've played.

Exactly, someone with a low ping and a high packet loss will be worse than someone with high ping and low packet loss.

Since the new beta patch it seems to run fine at ~300 ping as long as that ping is steady and stable.

I dono if he was taking a shot at the good ol USA but anyways.

On the topic of connection problems/ping. Has anyone got that SUPER annoying De-sync warning of a person thats De-synced? It pops up and its like "so and so is de-synced" and then I would hit ok. Then it would pop up like 5 seconds later. Good thing is we were winning so I was like meH I can handle this. but the really harsh thing is what happened next. I was getting ready to raise a tower, had my mouse in tower raising mode. THen that came up again, and you know what? My mouse icon was gone. I couldn't control anything or click ok to get it off. Luckely we had a army of creeps pwning their Citadel otherwise I would of been out of the entire game....THAT was a bit lame.

I stand corrected.

It's like this in Supreme Commander as well. No surprise as it's using the same engine. However, a desynced game is as good as over because the game's state is already "corrupted" - it's no longer consistent with all players. I would simply quit and get a new game going if I've encountered a desync.

Wow, that's an interesting read, I didn't realise there was a dedicated character for it, props on the research!

This is so wrong its not even funny.

I actually had a chance to play with some EU ppl and the games were fine. I usually always ping less than 100 to US/CA servers. The EU players all had 250-275 ping and the games were lag free.

If you are playing with someone who has fluctuating ping e.g.150-1000 plus ms that when you get crazy lag and stuttering.

Making such claims only gives the impression that you have very little knowledge about networking. I've played alot of games, and a constant ping is barely ever the problem, even at 300. First you have to connect to all, then the client has to not crash during game start, not hang while in loading screen. Then everybody has to turn of whatever makes the connection spike (packet filters, firewalls, avs, roommates that steal all the bandwidth), which really ruins the game. Then the guys having a P4 have to realise that it wont play Demigod. After that you better hope nobody drops early, because chances are bad, if you have an AI on your side, that is just plain stupid and completly suicidal.

If you get those right, then worry about constant pings, which in the worst case slows the game down a bit, but thats it. Mostly you will barely realise it.

Btw, "those of us that have a good ping", thats about the dumbest most egocentric bs I have heard so far.

I play a lot games with pings around 300 (europe to US west coast) and they usually work fine, what people fail to understand imo is that the ping shown only shows your ping to all others, yet if you are from germany and have ping 300 to West Coast and lets say one of the other players is from Kazahkstan the game will lag because they have a ping of over 400 to each other, thats why it is the responsibility of every player in the lobby to say that they have a ping >350ms.

@VypperXXX, once the game is released in europe you will notice that there are a lot more european gamers than american

I have played several games on pantheon against a guy from australia who i had a ping of 400+ to. His ping were steady which is why it didnt lag or studder, did have a very small delay in abilities and movement commands.

I tend to play at all hours of the day, so at times there will only be US games around, and some dont seem to understand a 200+ ping wont matter, there for i get kicked. There are lots of US hosts who do understand and let me play and it is smooth.

Only thing that really matters: is the ping steady!

btw im from Denmark

what people need to understand is that ping (latency) is not related to game stuttering.

Ping is the delay between data packets reaching the destination. example : the higher your ping the longer it will take until a mouseclick is reflecting in the game. For a game like this, everything below 500 ms should be fine, if you just adjust that when you click it will take xxx ms until the game will react. This is not related to stuttering.

the stuttering is caused because the game is using the udp protocoll, means that the data is sent from the client to the other clients , and is not checking if the receiver is able to receive the data. the benefit is that this kind of data packet is normally travelling faster through the internet , as no acknoldment data is sent back to the client. the downside is that of course if the data is lost , it is gone ... meaning the game has to stop the game for a short moment, moving everything to the right position again when all data is once again received, and continue..

Example 1:
a game where all persons have around 400ms, but no packet loss, can have a stuttering free game. the only downside for the persons is that when clicking on something that there is a short delay until the action is visible. (this is normally also know as lag )

Example 2:
the game connects with everyone around 50ms can be horrible if someone is connected where data packets are lost because of (maybe) wrong settings on WLAN, or haveing the background downloading stuff, using torrents.... there can be many reasons for that.

therefore at the moment, with the current information available in the lobby, it is not possible to see if someone will be causing stuttering or not, as the ping is not the correct indicator.

I hope this is more understandable for no network guys, i apologize for my bad english also.

<150 is optimal, expect minimal lag.

<250 is tolerable but can get irritating if someone is causing stuttering or other types of intermittent lag.

250+ is likely to cause fairly long duration (meaning 5-10 seconds) of latency from time to time, while this isn't totally unplayable its already pushing the boundary into no longer enjoyable.

a ping of 350+ is far too high to have a stable game. it will almost always result in a player being dropped due to timeout.

no , wrong

The optimal ping is the same as the answer to the universe:  42

Citation:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything#Answer_to_Life.2C_the_Universe.2C_and_Everything_.2842.29

I agree with this.

I also thought that ZehDon's post was quite helpful and straightforward explaination of what a 'ping' actually is.

Sometimes lag isn't caused by ping. There's a lot of times people people's machinces are slowing down the game because their computers just can't handle the game. And it seems a whole bunch of people are getting ping slow down and computer slow down confused.

If it is stable, then 300-350ping is completely fine. I've seen people with unstable 120ping completely ruin a game.

I refuse to play any game that says 150-200ping or below only. I think this is wrong. Sure you're ganna limit the possibility of lag, but someone with 50 ping can still lag or crash the game. But you're ganna have to wait awhile for anyone to connect and make full game.

Being as latency is the primary term used to refer to the time between my computer talking to your computer and the response my computer receives from your computer - as this time will always exceed 0ms - 'long durations of latency' would be the duration of the game. I'm guessing you don't have a background with networking?

A 'ping', or latency, of 250ms means the time between our computers talking 250 miliseconds. I'm not quite sure how this equates to 5-10 second pauses in the game without lag spiking, which as several people have already mentioned, is the primary cause of the in-game lag related issues. If you believe that 5-10 second delays are caused by 250ms ping times or higher, than 2-3 second delays are caused by latency times of 150ms or higher, and one second hiccups are caused by latency times of around 75ms. As anyone here will tell you, this is clearly not the case. Anything under 100ms is considered ideal as this provides near instantaneous response from the game.

A ping tolerance of 350 is coded into the game if I'm recalling correctly, and as such a time 350ms is completely acceptable, however it is far from ideal. It is also about stability. A stable ping time of 350ms is playable as people can adjust to the fraction of a seconded delay between an action and the response in the game. Above 350ms and the delay begins to effect the response time of people to a degree that it can have game-outcome-altering effects. However, as people have also supplied, even this is not a definitive rule.

Ease up a little with your standards and not only will you have more people to play against, you'll have less worries if your ping ever starts to climb while playing a game.

As stated before ping says nothing about the quality of the connecting, just something about routing (distance). It's a simple calculation of how long data at it's traveling speed takes to cover the distance from peer to peer. This has nothing to do with gaming, it's universal in all networking. When you type in google.com in your browser you also have a short delay equal to how long the data packets take to get from your pc to google's server and back. Ofcourse that's not the whole story, you have hardware delays, routing choices, etc.

The thing is, the number of ms it takes for a data packet to reach the target says nothing about how certain you are it'll reach its target. A packet might take 200 ms from the US to EU, but could fail to arrive half of the time. If the packet went from the US to australia and then to the EU it might take him 400, but if you would be 100% certain the packet would arrive it would mean you have a more stable connection and gameplay would be better.

For all people moaning about other people's ping: if you'd connect to a US server and you'd have a 50 ms ping you'd feel pretty good about your connection, you'd say you have a good connection. Now connect to an australian server and your ping would be 300 ms (because of the distance). Would that mean you have a bad connection now? But it was a good connection 2 minutes ago when you connected to US servers..! You see, ping says nothing about quality.

The fact is that most Americans (does not exclude others) don't get how it works at all. It's no flame, just an observation.  They are so used to having servers for every game nearby, that when they see a number that doesn't 'fit' to what they are used to they think it must be something wrong.

You guys can talk tech and quote your google research notes all you want, but at the end of the day, for most people, high pings equal laggy games.

I dont need to have any IT knowledge whatsoever to to know that 90% of my laggy, unenjoyable games are when there are folks with very high pings.

No one's arguing this at all, what we're arguing is what is the acceptable ping in Demigod? The answer: less than 350ms. In an MMO it can be as high as 450ms, and in an FPS you'll want less than 40ms. It all depends on the game as to what is considered a 'high ping'.

lag is a term used where the computer freezes and then continues some time later when an action is performed, for example clicking a mouse button. If there is different latency, such as distance between computers connecting, the term used is delay

Input lag is a phenomenon associated with some types of LCD displays, and nearly all types of HDTVs, that refers to latency, or lag measured by the difference between the time a signal is input into a display and the time it is shown by the display. This lag time has been measured as high as 68ms.

Latency is the time a frame or a packet takes to travel from the source station to the final destination.

Latency has three sources:

• the time it takes the source NIC to place voltage pulses on the wire, and the time it takes the destination NIC to interpret these pulses.
• the actual propagation delay as the signal takes time to travel through the cable. Typically, this is about 0.556 microseconds per 100 m for Cat 5 UTP. Longer cable and slower nominal velocity of propagation (NVP) result in more propagation delay.
• based on network devices that are in the path between two devices. such as routers, switches or other end devices.

ping is a computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network; it is also used to self test the network interface card of the computer, or as a speed test.

Ping measures the round-trip time and records any packet loss, and prints when finished a statistical summary of the echo response packets received, the minimum, mean, max and in some versions the standard deviation of the round trip time.

hopefully that cleared up some peoples understanding.