Someone ought to be sorry. Paul, perhaps. (rant) (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Friday, February 05, 2016, 07:41 (3010 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

"Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time." I interpret this as if you have a bad connection you'll be penalized. And damn we are all just arguing semantics of a paragraph and will know more next week.

In my brain, this translates to "a laggy player doesn't have an accurate view of what's going on in the game, so don't be surprised if what you see doesn't line up with what's actually happening".

In other words, if I'm lagging, I might not see that an enemy has shot me until a split second after he has shot me. In that split second I might duck behind cover and think I'm safe, only to have the hit register and kill me. From my laggy view, it appears I just got shot through cover, but everyone else in the game could see that I actually got shot before I had moved.

Basically, it sounds to me like they are trying to make hit registration more "fair" in that hits will register based on the true game-state, not the laggy player's out-of-date view of the game state.

If there's no authoritative server, there's no such thing as a "true game-state".

They are doing what some have asked for-- resolving conflicts between lagged and non-lagged players' game states in favor of the lower latency player (although since latency is a function of the delay between two points, you have to compare them to a third location, or to other players in the game. The game is already doing that somehow when it builds its green and red bars; it may be assigning red bars to players who have high latency to a significant minority or to a majority of other players, or based against a Destiny metaserver, or some other metric we're unaware of.)

I'd argue, as I have before, that the very nature of lag means that on balance, over time, the aggregate of encounters between lagged and non-lagged players already resolves in favor of the non-lagged players (excluding lagswitchers) for obvious reasons; so what Damage Referee purports to do is swing the balance further in that same direction in response to the vocal complaints of non-lagged players who feel they are being cheated of kills (and let's be fair, it's kills-- not wins, on balance) being stolen from them by lag.

I wonder if this will affect PVE encounters at all, or if it is only activated in PVP. Most of the update is in reference to crucible but it's never actually explicitly stated that DR only functions in PVP.
From the update:

Paul: If your connection is bad, we'll be giving you even more reasons to improve it. Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time. Things will get much better once you fix your connection, but at least you'll receive fewer angry messages in the meantime.

Crap like this is why Adam Orth lost a job, and why lots of developers put some kind of editor between an engineer and the public.

Paul.. Deej... for god's sake, did nobody review this?

Lose fights more often? My k/d is around .5 and I avoid Crucible like the plague already. I went there only for certain bounties I wanted, and I don't complain about those-- I don't think any one has a right to-- because I don't feel I have the right to expect access, or easy access, to every weapon in the game just because I bought it. It's not like that.

Fix my connection? Do you mean move halfway across the world? I've got 100mbps symmetrical fiber to the premises. The problem is that Destiny just isn't popular where I happen to live. Maybe that'll change in the future, and maybe it won't. I certainly don't consider it a design flaw of Destiny, either before or after this patch, that it's hard for me to get a good game or even a fair game, but for the love of all that's holy don't go telling people they have to "fix their shit" if they don't want to "lose fights a lot more often".

Fewer angry messages? I really don't care how many I get.

How about you, Paul?