Findings that survive the whole archive
What Tick Rate Actually Costs, In Milliseconds
The relationship between update frequency and peek advantage is arithmetic, not opinion, and it explains why a twenty-tick shooter feels dishonest even on a perfect connection. We worked the numbers across forty-one games and found where the perceptual floor sits.
What Happens To A Game That Runs One Hosting Region
Six games in the archive host in a single location. We tracked their population curves against multi-region peers and found the shape of the decline is consistent enough to predict.
Measurements not yet strong enough to publish
Correction visibility and complaint volume
Whether telling the player that a rollback occurred reduces the sense of unfairness. Rooftop Duel and Slipstream Nine both show indicators and both score well, but two games is not a finding.
Matchmaking latency ceilings
What round-trip time a game will accept before refusing a match, and whether an explicit ceiling produces better outcomes than filling lobbies regardless. Early figures favour ceilings around a hundred and twenty milliseconds.
Player count against tick rate
Whether studios trade update frequency for population in a predictable ratio. Banner Fields at four hundred players and ten ticks is the extreme, but the middle of the distribution is noisy.
Reconnection grace windows
How long a game holds your slot after a dropped connection, and whether a generous window changes how people play. Spore Depths holds for four minutes and it visibly changes the group's behaviour.
Why the logs are separate from the reviews
A review is allowed to be about one game's decisions. A log has to be about the medium, which means it must hold when we remove any single game from the sample — including the game that first suggested the pattern.
We have withdrawn one log to date, on whether cross-play affects perceived latency. The effect was real in the eleven games we had at the time and vanished by twenty-four. That withdrawal is still published, with the reason at the top, because a desk that quietly deletes its mistakes is not measuring anything.
- Published Sample above thirty games, survives removing any one
- Provisional Effect visible, sample below thirty
- Open Collecting, no claim made
- Withdrawn Effect disappeared as the sample grew
- Revised Threshold moved after new measurements