64 tick vs 128 tick: the decade-long debate continues

If you’ve ever spent more than just 10 hours playing any FPS out there, chances are you’ve heard about this one already. The endless debate about server infrastructure is something any player, from absolute amateurs to aim gods all the way to the top, has partaken in – with joy. And, after all, it is entirely understandable – your experience in the game is dependent on the game’s responsiveness.

A game’s responsiveness can be measured in multiple metrics, with some of them being completely objective – like your frames per second, your latency, absence or presence of packet loss, etc., as well as some subjective, down-to-feels factors like animation cancels and even meatier gun sounds with more “oomph”. I think most of us are pretty familiar with the running anecdote about the old school Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory player base finding a weapon with a more satisfying sound more powerful than its counterpart… despite both guns having equal stats.

But I digress. Of course, that was just an example of human psychology playing tricks on us since we’re all so prone to assumptions. This time, however, we’ll be talking about absolutely objective, factual factors… Or will we?

The elephant in the watchmaker’s room

First things first, it’s essential to outline the basic concepts behind what makes the multiplayer experience smooth. Even though these once used to be highly specialized terms, words like net code and tickrate are basically on every player’s mind – and it’s easy for these terms to get distorted over time when misused. And, I’ll admit, I’m guilty of this too – and aren’t we all – because calling out “oh my god, I got CS:GO’d again, 64-tick sucks” is definitely easier in the heat of the moment instead of admitting that I didn’t counter-strafe properly or decided to duel outside of my weapon’s effective range.

Some multiplayer concepts are intuitive. Stuff like latency, or more commonly named ping, is perfectly understandable to anyone who ever played any kind of online or co-op game. Even with modern gaming’s fancy lag compensation systems in place, it’s intuitively understandable why having a constant low response time makes the gaming experience much smoother compared to having ups and dips or, worse yet, a constantly high latency.

Yet, there still are some things that over time became the stuff of legend for players, talked about with awe and fear. Listen to some discussions on these topics, and you’d think that the developers possess the “fix-it-all button” in their briefcase, refusing to press it for some malicious reason.

Namely, I mean the main topic of this article. The tickrate is probably the most-mentioned part of netcode – and surely there is a good reason for that. On the surface, the definition of this term is simple enough – it simply means the number of times the server “refreshes” and updates information about every entity on the map per second. So a tickrate of 10 would mean an update every 100 milliseconds, simple enough.

But that already raises a bit of a question for some. The average human reaction time to a single stimulus is hovering around 200ms according to the data collected by humanbenchmark.com. Meanwhile, the fastest recorded reaction time is around 110-130 milliseconds, which is again to a single stimulus – while online games are far from having just one stimulus. So the question is: what difference do tickrates higher than 10 make if even the absolute reaction-time gods can’t actually react to them, let alone us 200ms~ peasants?

But of course, that was a trick question. Similar to the “human eye can only see 30 frames per second” non-debate, this was of thinking about tickrates actually misrepresents the actual mechanics of netcoding. Since the smoothness of online experience is actually a combination of different factors such as ping, your PC’s performance, and server stability, the impact of updates every 100 milliseconds is actually much higher than the sum of all parts.

The root of all evil

Let’s take a look at a netcode analysis of another rather trendy online FPS at the moment, Escape From Tarkov.

Even though it is quite old by now as it was done in 2018 by Battle(Non)sense – by the way, absolutely visit his channel if you’re choosing a new FPS title to play – this analysis plants the first seed of doubt in the all-mightiness of the tickrate. With an average tickrate of 68, the servers in that game used to update the relevant information just… every half a second or so, which can be felt by pretty much every human being.

The developers have since then vowed to make the game smoother to play, but the problems still remain, although not as extreme.

Escape From Tarkov’s tickrate actually is slightly higher than it is in the official Valve’s CS:GO matchmaking, yet, undeniably, nobody has ever has their shots desynched by almost a full second unless their own internet service provider decided they don’t get to play CS:GO anymore.
Yet, the players are adamant in pushing doubling that rate. And not just the average Joe – recently, a whole esports organization Gambit Esports came forward with a petition to increase the Matchmaking servers’ tickrate to 128-tick.

? Petition to upgrade CSGO servers to 128 tickrate

For: @CSGO
Sign: ✅

— Gambit Esports (@GambitEsports) November 18, 2021

I trust these guys to know what they’re doing – after all, it is literally their bread. And it’s not just the Russian organization stepping in: ranked as the number 1 player of all time, Natus Vincere’s s1mple also asked Valve for 128-tick servers among other stuff in his joking address to Gabe Newell.

Although, one things seems peculiar about s1mple’s request: his reason for mentioning 128-tick is simply for more accessible smoke throws. Which seems weird for most players, especially considering how much emphasis is put on higher tickrate being able to help with hitreg and even… spray control.

Yes, you’ve read that right – in a recent reddit post on the r/globaloffensive subreddit, the players speculate that, in fact, higher tickrates make spray control easier by resetting the gun’s spray pattern more quickly between each shot, resulting in a tighter, easier to control spray. As the thread gathered a lot of discussion with 600 upvotes, the CS:GO community shared their experiences with 64 and 128-tick servers and pretty much universally agreed on the notion.

And as with all things in life, it didn’t take long for another thread to pop up and test these claims. What the poster found was a tad discouraging for the “high tickrate = ez sprays” supporters. While some data was interesting, like the Desert Eagle not being able to precisely space its shots on 64-tick (300ms interval turns either into 293ms or 307ms) it’s important to remind ourselves that this machine level of precision is completely unattainable for real players, and as such, human error and weapon’s natural deviation account for far greater impact on weapons’ spray patterns than a higher tickrate.

And, confession time – yes, I do believe that 128-tick is clearly superior in all the way. But if we’re gonna keep pestering Valve about it, let’s do it in a dignified fashion. No anecdotes, just cold facts – surely, Valve will fix it then.