Cheating everywhere, GMs???

[DeathsSilkyMist]

I will try to make a very simple math example to show why online games are not a great way to judge reaction times.

In case you don't know, ping measures the round trip time it takes for a player to send data to the server, and receive it back. So if a player has a ping of 20ms, that means it took something like 10ms to send the data out, and 10ms to get the data back. It doesn't have to be a 50/50 split like that, but I will use it for simplicity.

Here are the conditions for the hypothetical example:

1. Racing Player A has 20ms ping.

2. Racing Player B has 200ms ping.

3. Observing Player A has 20ms ping.

4. All three players happen to recieve the "START RACE" message at the same time (in this case the target /random number).

5. Lets assume OP is correct, and normal humans have a 250ms reaction time.

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Racing Player A would send his "STARTED MOVING" command to the server at the 260ms second mark (250ms reaction time + 10ms to get his command to the server).

Racing Player B would send his "STARTED MOVING" command to the server at the 350ms second mark (250ms reaction time + 100ms to get his command to the server).

Observing Player A would see Racing Player A start moving after 270ms of seeing the "START RACE" message (250ms reaction time + 10ms for the command to get to the server + 10ms for the command to get to Observing Player A).

Observing Player A would see Racing Player B start moving after 360ms of seeing the "START RACE" message (250ms reaction time + 100ms for the command to get to the server + 10ms for the command to get to Observing Player A).

As you can see, it would APPEAR that Racing Player A had a 90ms head start for whatever reason. But that is only due to ping, not to actual reaction time. That is why you can't compare this to an Olympic race, because there is no intermediary between the "START RACE" signal and the players in real life.