(Since we three were knee deep in the connection discussion, I quoted you so that you’d both see I replied… because it’s worth it!)
The points you guys were making here had me doubting myself because there does seem to be more going on than what I was describing. So I decided to try my luck and see if I could get some official info on this, and I was able to. And guess what… your suspicions are justified. Despite WC3 and SC being from the same Battlenet 1.0 era…
Currently, WC3R does use a game proxy server to host the online games (both Versus and Custom). And like the other modern Battlenet games, there are several data centers stationed around the world that house them.
For the Custom game lobbies specifically:
- When creating a game, the client will ping all the available servers multiple times and select the one with the lowest average latency to the creator as the host. This is so the creator gets the fastest possible connection. (Which doesn’t guarantee a good connection, just the best possible.)
- On the flip side, when joining a game, the list of available games is a mix of different servers. Similarly, the client will ping all the available servers multiple times to get an average, and that determines the color bars for each game in the list. Thus, it’s the latencies to the hosting servers, not to the game creators themselves.
Then, once in the actual game (both Versus and Custom), the ping there is the latency between the players and the server, not between the players.
Having said all that, I want to point out that it’s not always the server that botches a match. Sure, they can still be buggy as we’ve seen so far, but if even one of the players has a bad connection to the server, it can stall everyone else who’s connected to it. And if the data takes too long to send/receive, the player(s) is kicked due to ‘not responding’ in time.
Hope this helps!
And on an unrelated note, because it came up in the convo with Bliz and because I’ve seen a couple people ask/confused about it, MMR is being used for matchmaking.