I think that's nonsense. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Sunday, January 24, 2016, 08:36 (3020 days ago) @ narcogen

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.

Uh... no. I honestly don't even see how you're connecting "take damage when shot by bullets" to "when they should not take damage." Right now, a lagging player causes other systems to use predictive animation to make a phantom version of that lagger that moves along the same vector as the last received packet. That phantom will absorb bullets as if it were the player, but when the lag catches up, the game sees that the bullets did not reach the actual position of the lagger (sometimes because the phantom was between where the lagger was and where the shooter was and stopped those bullets) so the lagger takes no damage. Maybe a lagger would think "well I shouldn't take damage from that rocket, it clearly detonated in mid-air several yards in front of me where absolutely no one at all was standing," but they'd be wrong to think that, because every other player in the game saw the rocket hit you in the face. You can only shoot at what you see, and when you connect with your target, it needs to deal damage to that target.

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.

Again, what? The actual effect of lag is that the damage receiving part of the player is not the same as the visible animated part of the player, and that's broken. They need to be the same thing in order to be fair and un-exploitable. I guess I can't convince you that bots aren't needed to observe the effects of lag in a game, but perhaps you'll realize that inventing an impossible scenario as the only means I have of convincing you that it does isn't particularly helpful. I'm simply unable to manifest your destiny lag bots in order to prove my point.

I do understand that, as the lagger, you do not feel advantaged. All I can say is that, as not the lagger, I do feel that people with a single lagger on their team have an advantage. I also can say that I'm not alone. Just search the many bungie forums for complaints about laggers and you can see that this isn't something I just made up to goad you with, but a real problem that many people are observing.

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.

Again, no. I don't even know what you're arguing here, and I think I need to step away from this conversation at this point. No one, NO ONE, thinks Bungie wants lag switching in their game. That being said, lag switching IS in the game, and there are ways to change the game code so that lagging of any kind, including the switching variety, does not separate the damage receiving part of the player from the visible and shootable part of the player. That's what I want.

When you shoot something, I want it to take damage. I cannot state it more simply than that. I'm sorry that you lag a lot, and I'm sorry that you feel like my complaints about lag are personal attacks against you. They aren't. The reason it sucks to play with laggers is not because they are lagging. It's because of how the game handles the lag, which is by making the lagger invincible during lag times. If the game handled lag in a more fair manner from a gameplay standpoint, then I would not be complaining about laggers.