Lag Switch Overview

I'm delighted to present a guest blog by my good friend, Dimitri Vougivich. (You'll have to excuse his English).


People keep asking me about these danged lag switches! Let me clear a couple things up straight-away.

First of all, I don't condone their use! Not physical lag switches, and not logical lag switches! I've never used one, and I never will. What's the point? The purpose of playing online, in my opinion, is to have fun. Where's the fun in cheating? Sure, you made your Gamerscore (G) increase a little, but where were all the struggles, laughs, victories, and just as importantly, failures, that you and your teammates would have shared?

Secondly, I don't think people are using them anymore. While it's true that I hardly use my 360 for gaming anymore (it's basically a media centre, now), when I am online, I no longer see any evidence of lag switches being used. 

So anyway, what is a lag switch? Before I can answer that question, I have to explain a little bit about how the Xbox Live operate. Your console communicates with Xbox Live servers in order to coordinate information with all the other consoles connected to the game you're playing. Information like player's position, what weapon they have, and kills that they have scored, must be sent to the server, and then mirrored on everyone else's console, in real time. 




When you're playing, and you score a kill (that is, shoot a badguy), that information is sent to the server, and the server bounces it back to everyone else's console. That way, everybody sees that you have scored, and the person you scored on is taken out of the game (killed and respawned). The console knows to take the enemy out of the game because he has been killed because the server tells it to - and the server knows to do this because your console told the server to when you shot the badguy. 

"So, Dmitri, how did you find out about lag switches if you never use them?" Good question! I was accused of using a lag switch once! See, I noticed that when I was playing xbox, my computer's fan would speed up, like it was working too hard. I thought Why would that happen? I'm not even using it? So, I ran netstat on my computer while I wa splaying Halo, and I find these IP addresses connected. I ran tracert to find out where these IP's are from, and it crashed my router! But I didni't loose my xbox connection, and when I came back online, everyone is yelling "DmVee has lag switch!"

This intrigued me, so I started Googling. It turns out that if your connection drops, or becomes really terrible, Xbox Live will boot you from  a game, so that the other players are not disrupted. But, if the quality of your connection doesn't fall below the threshold, your connection is maintained, and your character appears to be frozen in place.

So what's that have to do with a lag switch? Well, to make one, you take the Ethernet (CAT5) cable that comes from your 360, and plug it into a sort of switch, and plug that into  your router. The switch, when it's open, breaks the circuit of the orange wire. This makes the server think you have a bad connection, and you appear to freeze to all the other players. On the screen of the cheater, everyone else freezes, and you can shoot anyone you want.

 When you close the circuit again, your console reports to the server that you killed all those bad guys. Then it gives you points, and tells the other players that they're dead. 

So that's how a lag switch works. If you see a guy freeze, and then suddenly, he disappears from that spot, and gets like five kills in less than one second, he probably has a lag switch. Go ahead and report him. Microsoft will send an agent into a game and observe the cheater. If they see him cheating, they'll ban him, If not, then no harm done - maybe you accidentally reported the wrong guy or something?

Thanks!

DmVee (Dmitri V.)

And thank you, Dimitri!

»Tony

P.S. Dimitri tells me that it turns out the reason his computer was cranking up so much heat (and thus spooling up his PC fan) while he wasn't using it was because his screen saver program was using the SETI@Home program - analyzing data from radio satellites, and uploading the findings to the SETI institute. It's funny, because back around 2005, almost the exact same thing happened to me, although it was my Avast! Anti-Virus screen saver cranking up the heat!