Four games with a complete audit published
Verge Squad — 8.9
Nine hundred matches across a tick-rate change that tripled the update frequency and cut peek advantage from a hundred and ten milliseconds to thirty-four.
Slipstream Nine — 9.1
A hundred and twenty-eight ticks and rollback that shows its work. Still a driving game at two hundred and ten milliseconds on a throttled tether.
Banner Fields — 6.4
Four hundred players in a single battle, resolved ten times a second. The scale is genuine and the melee cannot be described by the update rate carrying it.
All eight, with every figure we published
Slipstream Nine
Racing. Rollback with a visible correction indicator, one hundred and twenty-eight ticks, and the only game here we could not break with a bad connection.
Verge Squad
Tactical shooter. Twenty ticks at launch, sixty after a server-side change, with nothing else altered. Our clearest natural experiment to date.
Rooftop Duel
One-against-one duelling. A hundred and twenty ticks, and a small icon that tells you the exact moment the server disagreed with your client.
Spore Depths
Cooperative survival for four. Thirty ticks, generous interpolation, and a design that assumes players will drop out and rejoin.
Bazaar Run
Trading world. Twenty ticks on movement and full authority on the market, which is the right way round for a game about prices rather than reflexes.
Dock Nine
Space station sandbox. Fifteen ticks, and a hundred-ship fleet battle that degrades into a slideshow at exactly the moment the fight is decided.
Frost Relay
Survival. Thirty ticks and one hosting region, which means excellent design delivered at two hundred and forty milliseconds to most of the world.
Banner Fields
Mass battle. Ten ticks with four hundred players, no latency-based matchmaking, and a melee system that needs at least three times the update rate.
Why the index looks nothing like the ones written on launch week
A launch review sees a server population of enthusiasts, on a build the studio is watching hour by hour, from whichever region the reviewer happens to sit in. It is the least representative test conditions the game will ever have.
We wait, buy at retail, and log from four connections including one deliberately throttled to resemble a poor mobile tether. That is why Verge Squad appears here at 8.9 having been widely written off at launch, and why Frost Relay sits at 6.8 despite design work we admire.
- Connections Fibre, cable, congested shared line, throttled tether
- Regions Six, including two we have no local presence in
- Matches Minimum 300 per game before publication
- Build Retail, bought with our own funds
- Revisions Re-logged whenever a server change is detected