I think that's nonsense. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Sunday, January 24, 2016, 12:27 (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.

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.

The game is not a democracy. It doesn't matter what "everyone else saw". The game should do as good a job as it can at managing the state of the playing field, and meshing its predictions with reality as it can. The answer to how to handle the situation when the game fails to do so, for whatever reason, is not to poll the non-lagged players. For the game to have even the appearance of fairness, each viewpoint needs to be as accurate as it can be, and when it can't be, it needs to fail gracefully. Bungie has apparently decided that letting a lagged player get away instead of dying is the way to fail gracefully. As a lagged player I agree, although I think I'd probably agree even if my ping was 5ms instead of 200.

[snip]

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.

Not the same as the visible animated part of the player FOR YOU. The game was bought and paid for by all the players, not just you, and not just for people with low latency connections like you. If you're trying to convince me that the big problem with crucible is that some low k/d players just aren't dying enough to enemies they never see... I just don't know what to say.

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.

If the lagged player is damaged by projectiles he doesn't see, how is that fairer than lagged players not being damaged by projectiles the other players do see? Frankly I doubt lagswitching is anywhere near as prevalent as people say it is. People see a player teleport, that they think should have died, and they just jump to "oh he's a cheater". I've been accused of it myself.

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.

It is not a real problem people are observing. It is a real thing people feel as they play the game. That's not the same thing at all. Lots of people feel that vaccines cause autism and that the moon landing was faked and that angels are real and that GMOs cause cancer and that climate change is a fraud, but lots of people feeling that way doesn't make it so.

I am a lagged player. (I'm also not great at the game, but that's a second thing.) I struggle to keep a k/d above .5. I rarely am on the winning side of a team game. When things get lopsided, people quit. I often find myself facing the kill leader more often than not because I'm an easy mark; most often the player who sees his or her target first, who gets the first shot off and lands it, is going to win, and that is usually not the lagged player. Even when I see myself firing first, either the shot doesn't land or the delay means it landed late.

About the only "advantage" I feel I've ever experienced is a slightly higher than normal chance to get dead man kills, usually with grenades-- presumably because the game allows for the completion of a grenade throw animation that I started before my client saw my death, but that to other players began after I was dead. There is no basis for the preference of the other client, or the other clients' view of the game state as being more authoritative than mine based solely on latency.

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.

What I'm saying is that Bungie knows there are lag switchers, and it knows there are lagged players. Their system works the way it does because that's the way they want it to. I think they are aware of your possible "solution" and have rejected it

When you shoot something, I want it to take damage. I cannot state it more simply than that.

If I don't see you shoot me, then you didn't shoot me. If that's because I lagswitched, then I'm a cheater, and they should catch me and ban me. If it was because of lag... tough crap, it happens, and it'll rob me of more kills than it ever will you or anyone who has ever played against me.

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.

I don't see your complaint as a personal attack against me. I see your suggested solution as unfair to me, because it is. If the game handled lag the way you want, of course you'd have no complaints-- those kills wouldn't just be easy, they'd be free!