• Forums
• Watch Videos
• Contact Us
• TK Store

Hello again readers, its your friendly neighborhood gaming fiend,  Big Shel.  I just want to sit down and chat with you guys for a second and tell you what I’ve been dealing with for some time now. Before I get into that, I would like to say that each week I will write an article called, “Diary of a Mad gamer”.  In these articles, I will be discussing certain issues within the industry, the community or current events that are not only effecting us as gamers, but is also infuriating as well.

Today’s topic is dedicated to the losers in our community that stoop the lowest of the low to win. Yes. Lag switch users.  Oh, how I loathe these miscreants! First and foremost, if you (and I do mean Y O U) are one of these sad losers,  just kill yourself.  Just go out & erase your existence from our community.  Secondly,  your an ‘Ass Syrup’.  I can’t believe the gall of some of the gamers these days!  You suck at a game or you care about your rank on the Leaderboards so much, that you have to purposely create latency in games to win.  Bollocks (normally I would put EPIC FAIL! Here, but isn’t that a tad bit played out by now?)!

What is Lag switching?  Its when some one uses a mechanism that inserts delays into the flow of local traffic to the Internet.  (NOTE:  I will not put in here how to make, buy or sell lag switches because no one here @ The Koalition supports lag switching.) It creates latency when the switch is activated, the device is designed to function for a few seconds on a timer, effectively blocking all network traffic between the local game device and the Internet temporarily. Used during gameplay, the device causes the person using a lag switch to appear to opponents as frozen while in fact they are still able to play locally and gain advantages in the game. When the lag switch timer expires, the local game device will resynchronize with the online game that appears to opponents in a sudden burst.

Being a network engineer (my side hobby of course) I can attest to how latency can kill a network.  From what Ive seen or heard, Lag switching devices are usually home made with an actual light switch (hence the name).  However, I just recently found out that people are now making actual devices that does the switching for you! You guys are almost as bad as lawyers. You know the party is guilty, yet you contribute to the foulness.  That right there is sad.  Ive seen lag switching first hand.  As a matter of fact, lag-switching is the MAIN reason why I stop playing Gears of War 2.  Every other online match had either a lag switcher or some one trying to bridge host (host of the match gains an advantage in said match).  Gears 2 was an excellent game,  however lag-switching killed it for me.

Normally you see lag-switching done in FPS games however, yours truly has a video of a lag switcher in the act using it against me in Marvel vs Capcom 2! (below)

As you can see there is latency in the match, yet isn’t it weird that the latency only shows up when I get close to his characters?  I have over six hundred matches in MvC2 (pre update included) on the Xbox Live arcade version and about a hundred on the Playstation network version and rest assured, Ive seen laggy matches.  The latency in laggy matches in Marvel vs Capcom 2 happens randomly during the match and it doesn’t matter where the character is on the screen.  In my video, you can see all the characters move freely and use specials, supers & hypers with no delay, until we are close.  Also another dead give away (to decipher the difference between regular lag and lag-switching) is the fact that during these lag spikes, his characters seem unaffected, while mines seem slow to react.  If it was regular lag, we both would seem like two drunk brawlers in a dark alley after a super bowl party.

So there you have it. Lag switchers are ‘Ass Syrups’ and a bane to our whole community. If you see one online. Make sure you file a complaint and pass the word (their Gamertags, wii code, steam ID, etc). We need to get rid of these guys.

Written By Shelton Doutherd

I call dibs on T.Hawk in SSFIV. Favorite games of all time; Guardian heroes, Chrono Trigger, King of Fighters 98. Capcom Vs SNK 2, Suikoden 1 & 2, Jet Set Radio & KOTOR