let me start by saying that I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post this question, and that it's potentially geographically specific, which could make it prone to be closed; but hopefully, enough people is having my same problem and can get help from this.
Back to my question. The problem is that I have an AT&T U-Verse internet connection, 12Mbps download, 1.5Mbps upload, I live in San Diego, CA; and 95% of the games I run into I get 3 bars of latency quality. I know a lot of you will say that it's not bad, but it is, every time I face someone in a gun fight, my first 2 bullets never hit them. And this is seriously impacting my KDR, so it's beginning to frustrate me. I tested in speedtest.net, and my ping is around 50 ~ 70ms in a server in Los Angeles, CA; 200 miles away from here.
Just wondering if anyone else has seen anything like this and if you know a solution or the source of the problem.
I'm thinking of upgrading to 24Mbps DL and 3Mbps UL, but I just wan't to be sure there's nothing else I can do before I try that.
I made the question specific to Black Ops because in Modern Warfare 2 I would always get 4 bars and get host most of the time. Which rarely happens in Black Ops.
Thanks!
Best Answer
After searching a bit, I found out that a very possible candidate for this problem is not anyone's connection / ISP / xbox. It's actually the game itself. Apparently treyarch reprogrammed something called 'Netcode' which compensates your ping with the one with the host. Since I have such good ping (UL and DL don't have any effect on this), I guess most of the people I play have a sucky one, so it ends up affecting me a lot. I'm not entirely sure how this works, but it sounds promising. And if that's the case, the only thing I can do is sit and wait for an update that fixes this, or stop playing if they don't.
Anyway, here are some links about that. Not official info, but it sounds right and makes sense:
Link 1
Link 2