I think that's nonsense. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Sunday, January 24, 2016, 05:13 (3321 days ago) @ Kahzgul

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.

So you want anyone with an above average ping to take damage when they shouldn't, regardless of whether or not they're exploiting?

F that. Seriously. In the ear.

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.

I know Destiny has no host, but without a host I think there's no way to make the comparison. All I'm really trying to do is isolate the actual effects of lag from the psychological effects. Bots are the only reliable way I can think of doing that, and the games I know of that allow the configuration I described above use a strict client/server architecture rather than peer to peer.

I'm sure Bungie already HAS all of this information. In the current setup, the only ones who can collect data from all clients, see how lag effects each, and make decisions on how matchmaking should work are Bungie. Yet apparently the consensus viewpoint is that Bungie is using this information to sneakily ally themselves with lagswitchers and people with bad connections against everyone else. What would possibly motivate this is beyond me, so I think one or more of the underlying assumptions needs re-examining.