I think that's nonsense. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Saturday, January 23, 2016, 08:55 (3322 days ago) @ narcogen

I rarely play multiplayer.

If you did, you'd realize almost immediately that lagging HELPS you most of the time. This is the opposite of what should be.

The reason why I don't play is because of the lag. Not just in Destiny, but Halo before that (although Halo, especially co-op, handled it so much worse it isn't even funny).

Lagging does NOT help. This is an illusion fostered by those whose primary experience of lag is their emotional reaction to being "cheated" of fair kills against a lagged player. Yes, the lagged player may avoid a death here or there, but getting kills is much, much harder. Most long range weapons without tracking are useless. You're reduced to being a shotgun camper because short range, hitscan weapons, and being unseen are your best chances for getting kills.

Lagging may not help the lagging player, but it most definitely helps that player's team. The lagger soaks up ammunition and supers which could have been used against non-lagging players, and the result is that the enemy team is often caught reloading or with wasted heavy ammo and supers. Having 5 laggers on your team wouldn't help, but a single lagger on a team is a great boon.

That and hunter tripmines. I think the most kills I've ever got in a Destiny multiplayer match came when I tried that new helm that grants an extra tripmine, and it allows you to just go nuts all over the map.

They're gloves. And yeah, they're great.

The primary way of using lag to gain an advantage is to lagswitch. I'm not talking about that.

Unfortunately, lag switches are pretty prevalent. Regardless, changes to netcode to force laggers to take damage or at least prevent them from dealing damage during packet catch up would remove the advantages granted by lag switching.

That said... I'd love to see a way to statistically and objectively substantiate the effects of lag, one way or another. Probably not possible with Destiny, but... if you had a game with client-side prediction that allowed the remote connection by otherwise identical bots-- ones that actually parse the visible field and don't just auto-aim to a precise location-- it'd be interesting to see how bots on the host fare against bots connecting remotely with a latency of, say, 200ms.

There's no "host" in Destiny. Or, rather, everyone is hosting themselves. But I get what you're saying. Seeing a team of 6 with great connections vs. a team of 6 with crap connections to see how everyone does would be interesting. But I think you'd better be able to see the real advantage of a lagger in a game where 11 people have good connections and only one bot lags.