The programming described in the article is spectacular too. Imagine working with 68 KB of space. I got to talk to someone who worked on the team once, which was probably the culmination of my life.
I started programming as a kid way back in the ZX Spectrum days, and that one had even less memory than that.
You can do a surprising large amount of functionality if you're hand-coding assembly (I actually made a mine-sweeper clone for the Spectrum like that).
Even nowadays, there is the whole domain of microcontrollers, some of which are insanelly tiny (for example, the ATTiny202 which has 2KB flash and 128 Bytes of RAM) and you can do a surprising amount of functionality even in C since modern C compilers are extremelly efficient.
(That said, that 202 is the extreme low end and barelly useful, but I do have an automated plant watering system I designed - complete with low battery detection and signalling - running on an ATTiny45, an older chip with twice as much flash and RAM).
In my experience, if there is no UI on a screen (graphical elements tend to use quite a bit of memory plus if you're doing animation you need an in-memory buffer the size of the video memory to get double-buffering for smoothness and just that buffer can add up a lot of memory depending on resolution and bytes per pixel), using a compiled language which can optimize for size (like C) and not dragging in a ton of oversized libraries as dependencies, you can do a ton of functionality in very little memory - there are quite complex functional elements out there (like full TCP/IP stacks) that fit in a few KB of memory.
I saw an interesting video about the first drone that flew on Mars. They programmed the flights in advance and it then executed them autonomously. I think that is even more impressive, since it would not have been possible to intervene if something went wrong. At the time the data was received, the drone already landed
IIRC that was part of the mission? They wanted to push themselves to see what could and could not be done with a very strict budget and cheap commonly available parts and tools.
That’s basically what spin launch did. They went and bought just consumer parts (not even the ones NASA could get/build) and put them into their centrifuge.
Snapdragon took care of image processing, guidance processing, and storing flight data—with readings 500 times a second—while the microcontroller was in charge of navigation and running the helicopter’s motors.
It's kinda mind-blowing that the same hardware from my trusty s5 (that is currently gathering dust in a drawer somewhere, rip) powered flight of a drone on Mars.
All of that with no GPS to get the location of the drone. They relied on a camera under the drone to basically act like an optical mouse sensor to follow the location of the drone.
I am not downplaying the supreme engineering of the mars rover team, especially because there is no GPS on mars, but DJI has pre-programmed drone flights that work with their consumer drones, called missions.
Well they used a camera to track features on the ground for navigating, but then flew into a sandy area with to few features and crashed xD To be fair it was never intended to leave the initially planned area in the first place. And they made the most out of it, the drone is now a lil weather station reporting temp and pressure
The rovers themselves have to do the entire landing (called EDL in NASA speak) autonomously. The process takes 11 minutes so, likewise, by the time we hear the report that EDL has started the rover is already on the ground.
There are more games than just FPS. Most RTS games won't matter much. EVE probably wouldn't matter too much either as the server only updates once a second.
Logically, given that we are still getting transmissions from the remote vehicles, either there are no aliens shooting back, the aliens have lousy aim or really bad weapons, or they've long destroyed those vehicles and what we're receiving are fake transmissions from the aliens.
So it is indeed possible that the aliens are shooting back but we can't tell from this side.
It's like playing Age of Empires over dialup. One minute you're happily building a little army and keeping your farms going. Then some asshole with cable internet comes along and faster than you can blink, your army is destroyed, villagers murdered, and your city burned to the ground.
I never figured out how, but it tended to feel impossibly early in the game too, as if the opponent had already been developing their economy for at least as long as I had before the game had even started.
It depends on what type of game you are playing, and how good the game's lag compensation is. I've played games just fine with a ping as high as 200ms.
I gave up sim racing online after a crash and seeing the other players replay of the crash. I didn't think I was at fault but because of the lag, I totally was.
My ping from Australia to Europe was just too much in order to ensure others could have a safe race. When everyone else has 20-40 ping and I'm racing with 150+ it's just too much lag to be safe on the track
Wow a dedicated line is serious commitment. But yeah ultimately when you're connecting to servers on the other side of the world there's not a lot you can do.
It would be comparable if NASA scientists were racing against someone else controlling another vehicle over there with less ping.
P.S. I'm not saying it isn't challenging - it surely is, but it's like connecting to your home computer over a shitty connection to play a single player game.
Back in my day, controls not matching the game play was kind of built in as part of the challenge.. Frog Master, Dragon's Lair, Space Ace. Probably others I'm forgetting.
I guess I don't really play any games where that tiny difference in ping time matters THAT much...That's less time than most people can even measure without tools
Would matter in pretty much any game where one player's actions can affect the other player and position is important.
SA:MP back in the day had such shit netcode you had to shoot a significant distance ahead of a running player or nothing would happen to them. It was the shot receicing player's client that had to detect the shot. In games where the server determines what happened to you, 100ms means there's 100 milliseconds where you don't even know you're dead. That said, unless you're playing competitive, 100ms is still borderline okay. Near 200 it's horrible already.
Now something like a game of Civ? You could have an entire second and be OK.
I think over 100 starts making your off-gcds clip on FFXIV, and stuff like getting 6 hits properly for Wildfire on MCH(probably some other stuff too). It's not unplayable, but it is frustrating and distracting, so can cause an ADHD person like me significant stress when doing content like Savage raids and Ultimates
Mch stands for Machinist, a ranged gun class in FF14, and wildfire is an attack from said class that gets stronger the more hits you land during its duration. The max hits is 6, but enough lag and you can only get 5 of them off in the window. The game has a default 2.5 second global cool down between skills, though some gear and some skills can reduce that. In particular for Wildfire, you combine it with a skill that allows 5 hits of itself plus 1 other at 1.5s per cool down, but if you're adding another .1 to each of those it can add up to miss unless very tight on timing.
Not a game breaker, but if you're trying to push through your best performance because your group is failing at 1-2% you can't really help not being mad at it.
Edit: in addition, the frustration isn't you personally dying in some pvp, but your group of 8 friends you're also holding back on fights. In addition to lowering damage, deaths can wear down your healers mp(and significantly lower your own damage output) so some tight mechanics can be harder to react, especially if your brain has you move wrong at first. None of these by themselves are terrible, but over the course of 3 hours working at clearing multiple fights it can wear you out and kill your enjoyment.
Edit: in addition, the frustration isn’t you personally dying in some pvp, but your group of 8 friends you’re also holding back on fights. In addition to lowering damage, deaths can wear down your healers mp(and significantly lower your own damage output) so some tight mechanics can be harder to react, especially if your brain has you move wrong at first. None of these by themselves are terrible, but over the course of 3 hours working at clearing multiple fights it can wear you out and kill your enjoyment.
I don't even do PVP in anything anymore. It's too stressful to be the only one who's trying to win while the other team is a group of friends that are full of gear I can't get. Between that and the people who actually cheat to win, I just can't do it anymore.
How do I know they cheat? because my attacks registered with a pretty high amount of damage and their health didn't go down even one bit. Other times, the same attacks with the same character will wipe out each enemy player I attack and it requires the entire other team to focus on just me for me to die
I like to play as stealth classes and I'm good at going to places most people don't check, you should see how I play Gmod prop hunt. I'm great at it
To human perception a 0.1 seconds isn’t much different than 0.03 seconds
You are making the mistake of thinking about reaction times. What matters much more in shooters is that our brain adjusts for the ping. That affects:
aiming with a lead of a few pixels. And in a fast moving environment, with skilled players, aiming for a lead of 30ms is absolutely a few pixels that can be targeted intentionally
the time between triggering a shot (nerve signal to the trigger finger) and the last chance that the target has to dodge / change direction -> in such games, players are rarely running in a straight line, and more often running preemptive zigzag / evasive maneuvers even when not getting shot at. 30ms more ping means that on every shot taken, you lose 30ms from the window in which your target still moves in the direction you thought it was moving. Even if the target only changes direction only once per second, that's 3% lost from the time window in which you can predict where to shoot. Actually more, because you have reaction time after a direction change, before you can even consider aiming.
furthermore, when a player with low ping gets hit by non-instant-kill ammo, they will dodge within their reaction time. Assuming the attacker chain-fires, they lose 30ms of ammo missing the target before they can adjust aim or stop firing
I don't believe you. An fps with ping as massive as over 1000 would be straight up unplayable
That's over a full second of delay! In an fps I routinely do split second maneuvers and reactions. If someone I was shooting at wouldn't be able to react to what I was doing for at least a full second, I would easily dominate them every single time
I don't always get 1.5mbps now and 1000ping doesn't work in a shooter. Depends on the game, some will make you basically unable to move, sometimes you basically warp around visually and fuck all happens, sometimes it seems fine but you die to people that don't exist because you have a second of delay.
I was dealing with spikes of 2000 to 10000 ping yesterday on Minecraft and playable is not a word I would use to describe those spikes.
Halo CE didn't have lag compensation, so with 2 seconds of latency you would have to lead your target by 2 seconds. Shooting anyone who wasn't standing still would be a complete guessing game - I think you too would also classify that as unplayable (source).
Halo 2 seems to not be well documented - it looks like it's using some form of rudimentary rollback, which can deal with higher latency but you'd need it very stable to avoid opponents teleporting constantly. It's also unclear if it would handle 2s of latency, as that would increase both CPU and memory utilization of servers. If you're getting a variance of 700ms as you claimed this most certainly wouldn't be playable. High ping being stable is also hard to believe, naturally the higher the latency the higher the absolute variance.
Halo 3 uses synchronous lockstep networking with a ~300ms window (source). If you're not in that window your actions are rejected, so quite literally unplayable at 2s. I think this is more evidence that bungie would've had a <2s maximum latency in their earlier title.
My best guess is you've either misremembered the latency (130-200ms is about what I'd expect from rural internet at that time), or you were playing peer-to-peer with your friends and so internet latency didn't matter. I myself have played plenty of multiplayer games at over 100 ping and while it can be annoying I'd certainly call it playable, but not 10x that.
oh wait, halo 1 on original Xbox didn't have Xbox live, right?
my friends and I would use a shared internet connection over our local PC with dual nics. software was running that would basically create a flat network VPN that would show us all as-if we on a LAN. think of it like xlink-kai before it was a thing. I can't remember the software name but we would use it for pc games like diablo, c&c, aoe, unreal, etc.
it was my idea to use it for Xbox with the network connection sharing on windows.
latency was a problem, but we still could play and it was enjoyable enough we'd do it weekly.
Sounds like great fun! We did the same thing to play battlefield 2 over LAN (If you played on LAN you could bypass the online DRM, as we only had one copy).
Yea Halo Combat Evolved (Halo 1) only had internet multiplayer on the PC version, but the Xbox version could do peer-to-peer multiplayer. One person would have zero ping as the host and the rest would go over the vpn. Any kind of latency would have been annoying due to Halo CE's lack of lag compensation :D
As an amateur, in a fast paced shooter, vs. an equally skilled player, it went from a fair match with equal pings to one player dominating the other with 100 vs. 70 ping.
Yes, that little of a difference absolutely matters, proven by the observation that it went both ways. I could become the clear winner, or my opponent, based on who had the lower ping, whereas in equal ping settings the games were much more balanced. It's easy to tell when you regularly play against the same people.
That's how fast paced shooters work. Don't think about the crap that people sell as "shooters" nowadays which is adjusted to playstation controllers or similar BS.
84 replies
They're not getting shot at
Assuming they're telling us everything that's happening on Mars, that is.
Where's the kaboom?
Yeah, I have my own thoughts about Ingenuity. With how long it took for the report there was clearly a lot of cover up.
Ingenuity my beloved I'll avenge you and retaliate against the Martians if I ever get to go to Mars.
Yeah, let’s see how well that ping works when they find a deathclaw in one of those trips.
YOU DIED (several minutes ago)
Even worse...
Hey is that... man that's a weird looking boatfly...
Wait.
OHGODOHGODOHGOD
Cazador : Welcome to the Mojave motherfucker!
Cazadores are the only goddamned things I actually have to use VATS for, as a PC player.
They are too, fucking, fast.
... Need a goddamned grenade launcher and elevation to take em out reliably w/o VATS, in my experience. That or a scoped rifle at long range.
Almost make you wish for a nuclear winter
Not yet
...the Voyager 1 team would like a word.
The programming described in the article is spectacular too. Imagine working with 68 KB of space. I got to talk to someone who worked on the team once, which was probably the culmination of my life.
I started programming as a kid way back in the ZX Spectrum days, and that one had even less memory than that.
You can do a surprising large amount of functionality if you're hand-coding assembly (I actually made a mine-sweeper clone for the Spectrum like that).
Even nowadays, there is the whole domain of microcontrollers, some of which are insanelly tiny (for example, the ATTiny202 which has 2KB flash and 128 Bytes of RAM) and you can do a surprising amount of functionality even in C since modern C compilers are extremelly efficient.
(That said, that 202 is the extreme low end and barelly useful, but I do have an automated plant watering system I designed - complete with low battery detection and signalling - running on an ATTiny45, an older chip with twice as much flash and RAM).
In my experience, if there is no UI on a screen (graphical elements tend to use quite a bit of memory plus if you're doing animation you need an in-memory buffer the size of the video memory to get double-buffering for smoothness and just that buffer can add up a lot of memory depending on resolution and bytes per pixel), using a compiled language which can optimize for size (like C) and not dragging in a ton of oversized libraries as dependencies, you can do a ton of functionality in very little memory - there are quite complex functional elements out there (like full TCP/IP stacks) that fit in a few KB of memory.
I saw an interesting video about the first drone that flew on Mars. They programmed the flights in advance and it then executed them autonomously. I think that is even more impressive, since it would not have been possible to intervene if something went wrong. At the time the data was received, the drone already landed
Built with such a tiny budget that they used cell phone parts
IIRC that was part of the mission? They wanted to push themselves to see what could and could not be done with a very strict budget and cheap commonly available parts and tools.
It worked surprisingly well
They blasted a bunch of phone hardware with radiation and picked the ones that held up
They then build a custom Linux system and called it a day
That’s basically what spin launch did. They went and bought just consumer parts (not even the ones NASA could get/build) and put them into their centrifuge.
Just this month they broke a 2 year silence.
Linky
And that's using the same hardware as you have in your phone. Not similar, the same.A snapdragon 801. Such as used in Galaxy S5, from 2014.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_devices_using_Qualcomm_Snapdragon_systems_on_chips
https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2021/04/23/smartphone-chip-powered-nasas-historic-flight-mars
It's kinda mind-blowing that the same hardware from my trusty s5 (that is currently gathering dust in a drawer somewhere, rip) powered flight of a drone on Mars.
All of that with no GPS to get the location of the drone. They relied on a camera under the drone to basically act like an optical mouse sensor to follow the location of the drone.
I am not downplaying the supreme engineering of the mars rover team, especially because there is no GPS on mars, but DJI has pre-programmed drone flights that work with their consumer drones, called missions.
https://developer.dji.com/doc/mobile-sdk-tutorial/en/basic-introduction/basic-concepts/missions.html
I've been thinking about setting up a mission for my drone to fly every week to gather data about what my neighborhood is like throughout the year.
Well they used a camera to track features on the ground for navigating, but then flew into a sandy area with to few features and crashed xD To be fair it was never intended to leave the initially planned area in the first place. And they made the most out of it, the drone is now a lil weather station reporting temp and pressure
The rovers themselves have to do the entire landing (called EDL in NASA speak) autonomously. The process takes 11 minutes so, likewise, by the time we hear the report that EDL has started the rover is already on the ground.
I lived in Western Australia when I played WoW - 400ms was a good day.
Love of the game right there lol I'd have gave up
Some games do alright with poor ping, some are unplayable.
No games that can't be played by mail can work with that ping dude
There are more games than just FPS. Most RTS games won't matter much. EVE probably wouldn't matter too much either as the server only updates once a second.
"The rover is tipping over. Quick, steer left"
That's because there are no aliens shooting back...
How are you so sure
Logically, given that we are still getting transmissions from the remote vehicles, either there are no aliens shooting back, the aliens have lousy aim or really bad weapons, or they've long destroyed those vehicles and what we're receiving are fake transmissions from the aliens.
So it is indeed possible that the aliens are shooting back but we can't tell from this side.
Or NASA has better ping than the aliens.
I like your world where Aliens exist, but our only interaction with them is children controlling the turrets on a toy car.
Oh great, so NASA is the mean one for not going easy on the kid. Now their big brother is gonna come next time.
You should have heard what the aliens were saying over voice comms. Their burns were so complex that even NASAs best could understand them.
It's like playing Age of Empires over dialup. One minute you're happily building a little army and keeping your farms going. Then some asshole with cable internet comes along and faster than you can blink, your army is destroyed, villagers murdered, and your city burned to the ground.
I never figured out how, but it tended to feel impossibly early in the game too, as if the opponent had already been developing their economy for at least as long as I had before the game had even started.
1-40ms - good
40-70 - less good but playable
70-100 - can have affects depending on the game
100-150 - not great
150+ - unplayable
It depends on what type of game you are playing, and how good the game's lag compensation is. I've played games just fine with a ping as high as 200ms.
I used to play Quake with around 300. I would have loved 100.
good luck railgunning someone who's rocket jumping with 300 ping
LPBs sucked...when you were an HPB.
Yeah, fuck those guys. I would have won for sure with 100ms /s
Who else remembers All Seeing Eye
I gave up sim racing online after a crash and seeing the other players replay of the crash. I didn't think I was at fault but because of the lag, I totally was.
My ping from Australia to Europe was just too much in order to ensure others could have a safe race. When everyone else has 20-40 ping and I'm racing with 150+ it's just too much lag to be safe on the track
Wow a dedicated line is serious commitment. But yeah ultimately when you're connecting to servers on the other side of the world there's not a lot you can do.
I regularly played with ping 100-150 and still managed to make it to the top 32 players
Honestly, it depends on the netcode implementation.
TF2 hitscan and projectiles work remarkably well even at 100+ ping.
TF2 melee hit detection functions like a dice roll above 40 lol.
EA: hold my beer
For example: in FC25 you can have 14 ms ping to the server, but still have a laggy experience as if you are playing with 1,400,000 ping.
They be secretly training you all up for NASA rover drivers
It would be comparable if NASA scientists were racing against someone else controlling another vehicle over there with less ping.
P.S. I'm not saying it isn't challenging - it surely is, but it's like connecting to your home computer over a shitty connection to play a single player game.
insert Amateur meme
Back in my day, controls not matching the game play was kind of built in as part of the challenge.. Frog Master, Dragon's Lair, Space Ace. Probably others I'm forgetting.
gutteral UT dialup laughter
What is this image from?
Iron Giant I believe. Though he's not actually holding a mug of himself 😄
Based on a google search it is. It looked kind of familiar. I need to watch that movie again. Thank you!
100 ping? you seriously can't play with a tenth of a second ping time? Sounds like you're a shitty gamer making excuses
In some games it is genuinely unplayable. This is coming from someone with on average 200+ ping with spikes up to 600 sometimes.
I guess I don't really play any games where that tiny difference in ping time matters THAT much...That's less time than most people can even measure without tools
Would matter in pretty much any game where one player's actions can affect the other player and position is important.
SA:MP back in the day had such shit netcode you had to shoot a significant distance ahead of a running player or nothing would happen to them. It was the shot receicing player's client that had to detect the shot. In games where the server determines what happened to you, 100ms means there's 100 milliseconds where you don't even know you're dead. That said, unless you're playing competitive, 100ms is still borderline okay. Near 200 it's horrible already.
Now something like a game of Civ? You could have an entire second and be OK.
I think over 100 starts making your off-gcds clip on FFXIV, and stuff like getting 6 hits properly for Wildfire on MCH(probably some other stuff too). It's not unplayable, but it is frustrating and distracting, so can cause an ADHD person like me significant stress when doing content like Savage raids and Ultimates
Final Fantasy 14? Don't know what MCH is, never heard of Wildfire
Mch stands for Machinist, a ranged gun class in FF14, and wildfire is an attack from said class that gets stronger the more hits you land during its duration. The max hits is 6, but enough lag and you can only get 5 of them off in the window. The game has a default 2.5 second global cool down between skills, though some gear and some skills can reduce that. In particular for Wildfire, you combine it with a skill that allows 5 hits of itself plus 1 other at 1.5s per cool down, but if you're adding another .1 to each of those it can add up to miss unless very tight on timing.
Not a game breaker, but if you're trying to push through your best performance because your group is failing at 1-2% you can't really help not being mad at it.
Edit: in addition, the frustration isn't you personally dying in some pvp, but your group of 8 friends you're also holding back on fights. In addition to lowering damage, deaths can wear down your healers mp(and significantly lower your own damage output) so some tight mechanics can be harder to react, especially if your brain has you move wrong at first. None of these by themselves are terrible, but over the course of 3 hours working at clearing multiple fights it can wear you out and kill your enjoyment.
I don't even do PVP in anything anymore. It's too stressful to be the only one who's trying to win while the other team is a group of friends that are full of gear I can't get. Between that and the people who actually cheat to win, I just can't do it anymore.
How do I know they cheat? because my attacks registered with a pretty high amount of damage and their health didn't go down even one bit. Other times, the same attacks with the same character will wipe out each enemy player I attack and it requires the entire other team to focus on just me for me to die
I like to play as stealth classes and I'm good at going to places most people don't check, you should see how I play Gmod prop hunt. I'm great at it
If the person shooting you has 30ms ping, I'd say it's a significant advantage.
To human perception a 0.1 seconds isn't much different than 0.03 seconds
I forgot if it was you I asked about this or not. But are you sure the one with slightly less ping time isn't just cheating?
You are making the mistake of thinking about reaction times. What matters much more in shooters is that our brain adjusts for the ping. That affects:
if a person shooting me has a lower ping and I get upset about it with a 100 ping I need to touch grass.
back in my day I played Halo with a 1300-2000 ping and still whipped ass.
the lama's ass?
I don't believe you. An fps with ping as massive as over 1000 would be straight up unplayable
That's over a full second of delay! In an fps I routinely do split second maneuvers and reactions. If someone I was shooting at wouldn't be able to react to what I was doing for at least a full second, I would easily dominate them every single time
believe it or not. this was early 2000s, so everyone outside of major cities had shitty internet.
I had the fastest connection in my small shit town at 1.5mbps.
I don't always get 1.5mbps now and 1000ping doesn't work in a shooter. Depends on the game, some will make you basically unable to move, sometimes you basically warp around visually and fuck all happens, sometimes it seems fine but you die to people that don't exist because you have a second of delay.
I was dealing with spikes of 2000 to 10000 ping yesterday on Minecraft and playable is not a word I would use to describe those spikes.
thresholds today and thresholds 20 years ago are vastly different.
my point was that it's possible to play a game even at "high" ping.
I also don't believe you, and here's why:
Halo CE didn't have lag compensation, so with 2 seconds of latency you would have to lead your target by 2 seconds. Shooting anyone who wasn't standing still would be a complete guessing game - I think you too would also classify that as unplayable (source).
Halo 2 seems to not be well documented - it looks like it's using some form of rudimentary rollback, which can deal with higher latency but you'd need it very stable to avoid opponents teleporting constantly. It's also unclear if it would handle 2s of latency, as that would increase both CPU and memory utilization of servers. If you're getting a variance of 700ms as you claimed this most certainly wouldn't be playable. High ping being stable is also hard to believe, naturally the higher the latency the higher the absolute variance.
Halo 3 uses synchronous lockstep networking with a ~300ms window (source). If you're not in that window your actions are rejected, so quite literally unplayable at 2s. I think this is more evidence that bungie would've had a <2s maximum latency in their earlier title.
My best guess is you've either misremembered the latency (130-200ms is about what I'd expect from rural internet at that time), or you were playing peer-to-peer with your friends and so internet latency didn't matter. I myself have played plenty of multiplayer games at over 100 ping and while it can be annoying I'd certainly call it playable, but not 10x that.
thanks for hyper analyzing.
it was Halo 1 on the original Xbox early 2000s.
oh wait, halo 1 on original Xbox didn't have Xbox live, right?
my friends and I would use a shared internet connection over our local PC with dual nics. software was running that would basically create a flat network VPN that would show us all as-if we on a LAN. think of it like xlink-kai before it was a thing. I can't remember the software name but we would use it for pc games like diablo, c&c, aoe, unreal, etc.
it was my idea to use it for Xbox with the network connection sharing on windows.
latency was a problem, but we still could play and it was enjoyable enough we'd do it weekly.
Sounds like great fun! We did the same thing to play battlefield 2 over LAN (If you played on LAN you could bypass the online DRM, as we only had one copy).
Yea Halo Combat Evolved (Halo 1) only had internet multiplayer on the PC version, but the Xbox version could do peer-to-peer multiplayer. One person would have zero ping as the host and the rest would go over the vpn. Any kind of latency would have been annoying due to Halo CE's lack of lag compensation :D
As an amateur, in a fast paced shooter, vs. an equally skilled player, it went from a fair match with equal pings to one player dominating the other with 100 vs. 70 ping.
that little of a difference really matters? Are you sure that the one with a tiny bit less ping isn't just cheating?
Yes, that little of a difference absolutely matters, proven by the observation that it went both ways. I could become the clear winner, or my opponent, based on who had the lower ping, whereas in equal ping settings the games were much more balanced. It's easy to tell when you regularly play against the same people.
That's how fast paced shooters work. Don't think about the crap that people sell as "shooters" nowadays which is adjusted to playstation controllers or similar BS.
Think quake, unreal tournament, quake arena, openarena.