In an ongoing effort to improve Killzone’s Shadow Fall‘s multiplayer experience, developer Guerrilla Games is looking in to ways to “reduce lag” in online combat.

Numerous investigations are being made into what the studio considers “laggy kills”, or any kill that takes longer than 0.5 seconds to register.

“To our surprise, we saw that the percentage was really dependent on the region: US-East showed 13% laggy kills, US-West 6%, and other regions around 4%,” wrote lead game tech Jorrit Rouwe in a recent blog entry. “Moving some of our servers in the US-East region to a different data center resulted in the percentage of laggy kills on those servers decreasing by a whopping 10%.”

Unfortunately, a similar solution appears to have not worked out as well for US-West gamers, though the studio says the’ve “found that the quality of [players’] wireless connection may be a contributing factor.”

Taking steps towards a proper solution, Rouwe outlined a number of incoming tweaks that players will find in the next patch, as well as what the team is working on for future updates. Check out the details below, as seen on the official blog.

Next Patch

Connection Quality Screen

We have been working on a feature that tells you how good your connection is. You can look at this information in the options screen.

As you can see we measure a number of aspects of your connection:

• Nearest Server: This shows the country where the closest server is located. In-game this changes to the ‘Current Server’ which may be a more distant one if no players were found on the ‘Nearest Server’.
• Round-trip Time: Time it takes for a packet to travel to the ‘Nearest Server’ and back. In game this measures the round trip time to the ‘Current Server’ so may give you a worse score.
• Packet Loss: The amount of packets lost in transit. A good connection should have less than 1%. When playing on Wi-Fi this percentage is usually higher than when playing Wired.
• Download: The measured download speed in kilobit/s.
• Upload: The measured upload speed in kilobit/s.
• Connection: If your connection is Wired or Wireless.

Each of these categories will get a quality score ranging from 0 to 5 bars. The lowest score is shown as the main ‘Connection Quality’ score and is also displayed on the score board and in the main multiplayer menu.

The main purpose of this connection quality screen is to allow you to determine if it is you who is lagging or if it is one or more of the other players in the match. It will also make it clear when you’re playing cross-region.

Server Ping Grouping

We believe that everyone should be able to play, but we understand that if you invested a lot of money in a good internet connection that you deserve to have a good game experience. In the next patch, matchmaking will try to group people with similar connection quality to the server together as much as possible.

Improved Party Matchmaking

We have improved party matchmaking. The matchmaking server will now assign the party to the region where most people come from. Previously the region would be determined by the party leader.

In Progress

Clan Matchmaking

In the future we will be optimizing the matchmaking system further for clan matches, so that a match between a clan from the US-East region and a clan from Japan may be hosted in the US-West region if that results in the lowest total ping for all players.

New server locations

We’re starting tests with a data center in Dallas to improve connection quality for players in the middle of the US. We’re also still investigating data centers in the Middle East, but unfortunately there are very few data centers there that meet our needs at this time. We are currently looking into a data center in Istanbul.

Return to Own Region

If you ended up playing cross-region because there were no games available in your own region, the game will check for game availability in your own region again upon round rollover. If a game has become available in your own region you will be returned to your own region.

More Information

We observed that most cross-region play occurs on custom Warzones where the player count is low. Currently we will only show you the amount of players that are in a custom Warzone, but in the future we will also display the amount of players that are playing in your own region. This will give you a better indication of the quality of the game.

Rouwe didn’t provide any details on when the incoming patch might become available. Keep your sights on MP1st for updates.

Be sure to check out some of the updates that were included in the latest Killzone: Shadow Fall patch.