I think that's nonsense. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Sunday, January 24, 2016, 17:29 (3020 days ago) @ narcogen

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!

I'm glad you're not taking it personally; it really seemed from your previous statements that you were.

Let me say that I am not advocating change because I personally feel it is unfair. I worked in video game development for 13 years. A significant portion of that time was working on competitive PvP FPS games. Lag is an issue that I'm intimately familiar with from both the player and designer standpoint. I'm clearly doing a poor job of explaining how a change is needed, and how that change would be more fair to both non-laggers and laggers alike. Sorry about that.

Presently, if someone lags, the predictive algorithms in the game keep the avatar of the lagged player moving in the direction they were before they lagged. When the game catches up, it then figures out if the bullets fired at that avatar hit where the player actually was at those times. Usually they don't, and often its because they were stopped by the avatar!

The best solution is dedicated servers. Always and forever.

Second best is to make the player with the best connection the host. This provides a small advantage to the host, but otherwise means that what's actually going on within the game is managed by a solid connection, which would reduce lag as much as possible without having dedicated servers.

Neither of these solutions mean you have to be stuck in place while lagging. Bungie has impressive predictive algorithms which generally make the game look incredibly smooth. Those should stay in place. The change I'm advocating is that instead of asking an individual player's system whether or not that player got hit by any given bullet, all of that polling is answered by the host machine or dedicated server.

For a lagger, the result would probably not look any different than it does today. Honestly, you'd notice almost no difference. For non-laggers, however, the change would mean that laggers would die immediately when you shot them rather than several seconds later. Those corpses would still be able to shoot you because the host would not be preventing the lagged players from shooting after they died on the host system if they had not yet died on their lagging system. But they would not be soaking up supers, rockets, and bullets from the non-lagged players. It would still be annoying to a degree, but the advantage that exists right now would be eliminated.

You're never going to eliminate all lag, and people with chronically lagged connections are always going to have a sub-par experience with online multiplayer. The goal is to minimize the disruption caused by lag to all players. This is a problem that has been solved by many previous games, and it's weird that Bungie has insisted on reinventing the wheel when it comes to handling lag, and - sadly - their new wheel is a little bit square.