Bullet chess lag biased toward Americans?

Hi all,

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.

My question is, is this right?

If I type /ping and my ping is 135ms and my opponents is 22ms, for every 10 moves of the game they have essentially had an extra second of playing time? 40 move game? 4 seconds.

If so, how are players from places like me from Australia/NZ supposed to compete in 30 seconds or even 60 second bullet games? And... why not - atleast for paid members - allow us to connect to our local chess.com server so our ping is better? I know you'd have to sync game time across the servers involved but I think fair play is important and no one can trust the bullet leaderboard if nothing is done to fix such a crime  

Thanks

bump

Does anyone know if this is right?

I believe most (if not all) of chess.com's servers are in the US.

'biased toward americans' is a weird way of asking whether the servers are based in the usa or not. no need to bring american people into it lol

No, it’s 0.1 seconds. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Yep.

https://support.chess.com/article/642-what-are-premoves-and-how-do-they-work 

“Pre-moves take effect almost instantly - pre-moves have been implemented so that they consume 0.1 seconds of your remaining time.”

This is correct. I just goggled to find out if I was the only one who felt this. Difficult to beat players based in US with similar bullet ranking 

Yes, it's very disappointing and makes bullet chess much more difficult if you are in a country far away from the US.

My ping is rarely below 150, and it means I have a much harder time playing time scrambles against players from the US with <50 ping

And they are using these multiple premoves which is just basically test of internet connection in some games. Really unfair, they should remove multiple premoves, because then the player would need at least to move on correct pace.

All website users can use multiple premoves.

Yeah, chess.com should make more servers and expand to make a more equal playing field .

Thanks for the comments, everyone.

I know it'd be a bit of an architecture nightmare for the dev's that are used to single server games, but really with cloud computing they should spin up servers in all regions, players connect to their own region <50ms ping, and travel time between the chess.com servers is not included in the match clock.

Currently LiChess I assume uses clientside javascript to ensure the time is correct but that means its open to exploitation.

If chess.com really wants to be the leader in online chess, they really need to think about this change, the "Bullet chess championships" honestly mean nothing without it.

Apologies for bringing Americans into it, just wanted for the post to hit, lol.

Geographically distributed servers are a work in progress (some games already are played that way).

Is this - if two players are in the same region they connect to the same server?
If so, if an American and an Aus player play each other, how does it choose which server to use?
Your statement invites many questions... to try and understand if this actually solves the problem(s), is there any blog or anything that describes in more detail how this works?

Some games... which games?

I definitely could be wrong, but I don't think the player with higher lag gets penalized.
I don't know, I'm just speculating, but I imagine the clocks for each player are managed locally. A player in their own client would get the transmission of the opponent's move along with a time remaining value from the opponent's clock. Then the player's own local clock would start counting down and when the player makes a move that move along with the time value from the local clock would be transmitted back to the opponent. That way lag actually does not come off either player's clock.

Lag is measure between the client and the server. So a player is never penalized for the lag of their opponent. However, both clocks will be updated to reflect the server official times, with the lag compensation accounted for, when receiving moves.

https://support.chess.com/article/423-why-did-the-clock-times-suddenly-change-the-clocks-seem-broken