I think that's nonsense. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Tuesday, January 26, 2016, 06:06 (3319 days ago) @ Kahzgul

I guess I still have a few problems with your whole outlook on this:

- I still don't really buy that Destiny's handling of lag is significantly worse than any other game. And I think you underrepresent the advantages Destiny's systems brought us when compared to Bungie's previous titles. (Those advantages being things like drop-in matchmaking, never going to a black screen to try and reconnect players after a host drop, minimal gameplay disruption when any player drops, etc)

- Destiny is certainly better than Halo in that Halo forced every system to match all the time, which was rough and made for some lengthy "catching up" pauses and lots of host migrations etc.. to find the best server. Absolutely. But halo had a lot of things to commend it. Notably that it felt fair (disclaimer: I have not played any Halo since Reach, and I almost mostly played Halo PvP with friends during LAN parties rather than online with strangers, so my exposure to actual online halo is pretty low), even if it had connectivity issues.

No. That's revisionist, plain and simple. Halo 1, Host was almost invincible. Even in LAN games. In Halo 3, the game would lag for minutes at a time and I'd just take damage from literally nowhere. And then my shields would fail to recharge. And then I'd keel over seemingly at random. I honestly cannot recall anything like that ever happening in Destiny. Even if its something similar, Destiny manages to give me a little idea of where the enemy is while Halo often wouldn't.

- I think your suggestion that they rewrite the network stack is just plain silly. Surely you understand that what you are suggesting isn't just some minor task that can be completed over a weekend, or a week, or a month. And given that all of Destiny seems to run on the same type of networking vs the split types the Halos used, rewriting the networking and having both the Crucible and single player continue to function seems like a complete impossibility. But instead of acknowledging that you ding Bungie over and over for not doing it.

While I think a wholly new network stack would be ideal, it's clearly impossible. It's probably impossible for Destiny 2 also, unless they get loaned a network stack from another studio (not unheard of, but still unlikely, especially as Bungie prides themselves on doing it themselves). The realistic change I'm asking for is a change in how bullet damage polling works so that when I kill a guy on my system, he dies on my system, even if he hasn't died yet on his actual system (but will when he catches up). Bungie is already using predictive algorithms quite a bit - why not predict that I did enough damage to kill the guy? Then I won't be wasting more ammo on someone who is already dead.

I cannot believe that dropping in a new premade network stack to Destiny is anything other than impossible. No other studio has something that will power Destiny's Crucible, and Patrol, and Raids. It took Bungie multiple tries to get Raids to perform the way they wanted, and that was with their own code. Someone else's is just going to replace all that? Not a chance.

I can't see your predictive death working well either. You kill the guy on your screen... except you didn't really kill him in actuality ... then what happens? A guy who the game showed you killing will magically comes back to life and kill you instead. What kind of solution is that? Maybe it works in one narrow case or even is balanced more in the favor of the player with a good connection, but overall it sounds at least as problematic as what happens now, if not more so.

- Finally, I think perhaps we should stop talking about the possible advantages Destiny gives to laggers manipulating network traffic. Specifically: Those people are not laggers and lag is no longer the issue. Those people are cheaters and the best way to fix the problem, no matter how the networking does or doesn't work in their favor, would be to ban the heck out of them, delete their profiles, and tell them to never come back.

Agreed, and I've been trying to avoid that subject. My above posts are all aimed at general lag, not at lag switchers. A lag-switcher still gets real-time downward traffic, so they can see where you are and shoot you. Then when they switch their lag off, all of their bullets fire at once, and kill everyone they shot, all while they were effectively moving invisibly through the map. I have played against a couple of serious lag switchers in trials and it's not fun. You see a guy running into a wall for a bit and then all three players on your team are dead at once, all from the same guy who just teleported back behind you. Also: While I did encounter a pretty obvious lag switcher in salvage earlier this week, I haven't seen one in trials or IB for at least a month. Even though Bungie's been pretty mum on when they ban people and how many they ban, it seems to be pretty effective.

Yeah, I simply haven't seen that. Not saying it doesn't happen though. Trials seems to be the place people see the worst and most questionable lag and I don't hardly play it. The non-self-revive rules do not appeal to me. I'm actually quite good at Skirmish, it maybe be my best gametype, but I think my play style is just one step too risky and one step too adaptive (where Trials does not allow you to adapt mid round) to have much fun.