Overwatch has a lot going for it. Interesting heroes, a great feel, beer—the list goes on. It’s crazy to think that this is Blizzard’s first FPS. It is, however, conspicuously lacking in one area. It’s called “tick rate,” and it has an impact on the game’s responsiveness.
What you’re seeing/doing and what the server in a game like Overwatch registers are not 100 percent in sync. The server’s receiving input after input from you and other people, and nothing’s instantaneous. The tick rate measures how often the server updates per second. Per Eurogamer, Overwatch’s tick rate is, by default, 20.8hz. Games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Battlefield 4, meanwhile, set theirs at around 60hz. In a game that often comes down to split-second reflexes, that makes a big difference.
You might not notice this initially, but I’ll give you an example from personal experience. Last night, I was playing as Reinhardt. My shield got busted, and I was being chased down by a D.Va and a Mercy. Smelling blood, they got sloppy going for the kill. They were right in my face. Pinning D.Va would be easy. I hit my charge button and made contact… only to suddenly die. In the replay, my charge never happened. No sound effect or anything. The server instead registered one of D.Va’s shots hitting me before my charge ever began. That handful of milliseconds—tossed carelessly into the void—cost me my life (and a chance to look like a Real Cool Guy to people I’ll never talk to again). I’m not entirely sure if general latency or tick rate was more to blame (probably both), but this is the sort of thing that can happen when the local client and server get too out of sync.
Players have alleged that Overwatch’s comparatively low tick rate is responsible for ample missed shots hitting, for clumsy snipers with spaghetti for hands being able to play Widowmaker and Hanzo like assassins. They might be overstating the effect (it takes a lot more than pure sniping to play Widowmaker and Hanzo well), but there is a measurable delay produced by Overwatch’s tick rate. Battle(non)sense measured it in a video that’s made round after round after round in the more competitively oriented portion of the Overwatch community.
The takeaway? “After 40 tests, the highest measured delay was 105 milliseconds,” he said, having compared shots fired between two PCs on separate Internet connections. “On average I measured 90 milliseconds, and 67 milliseconds was the lowest measured delay.”
In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. But again, when pure, adrenaline-fueled reflex is in the mix, even a tenth of a second can be significant. With a 60hz tick rate, there’d still be a delay, but it’d be up to 30 milliseconds less.
You can play Overwatch with a 60hz tick rate, but only in a custom game mode. In a video announcing the high tick rate mode, lead engineer Tim Ford confessed that it can help “a lot,” even if you’re dealing with latency that might arise from, say, playing with people in another country. It won’t solve your latency problems, he stressed, but it will have an impact.
via Kotaku