Returning to Iron Banner after a Month Off... And I'm salty. (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, April 30, 2015, 14:52 (3276 days ago) @ Kahzgul

...sigh. Salty post incoming...

Before you say my connection must stink, I get 50 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up (and I checked many times last night because of the reasons I'm about to enumerate).

Not discounting your frustrations here (I feel your pain) but just because you have a good connection, that doesn't mean the other players in the match have good connections. The problems you described sound exactly like the symptoms of playing against opponents who are suffering from packet loss, slow upload connections, or both.

Basically, if a player has a poor connection, it can make it difficult for him/her to update the host with accurate information about where exactly they are, and what exactly they're doing. So a player might rush at you and hit you with a shotgun, but their poor internet causes a gap where you don't actually see it happen because the host literally doesn't know these actions have happened yet. Then the connection kicks in again, and the host gets an update and realizes "oh, they've actually moved 3 feet and pulled the trigger twice" and adjusts.

Side-rant:

Ever since playing the Alpha, I've wondered if Bungie is using the tech that powered Halo's theater mode as some kind of "lag compensator" during Destiny PvP matches. The theater mode runs on what is essentially a data log of every single player input and game calculation that happens during a match. When you load a "saved film", that log is being loaded back into the game, so the engine can recreate every single thing that happened in real time.

In Destiny, I see lots of situations where I see my bullets hit a guy, but he doesn't die. In the meantime, he kills me. Then a split second later, he drops dead and I score the points. In Halo, this wouldn't happen. If there was lag that prevented my kill from registering with the host, I was SOL. But in Destiny, I think the host constantly checks it's "theater log" against each player's log and looks for discrepancies. When it sees that my log shows I aimed at a target and did enough damage to score a kill, it updates the host log and makes the adjustment a split second later, hence the delay.