Bishop Steiner, on 15 February 2015 - 09:47 AM, said:
So, as we all know, hit reg can be....iffy at times. And Weekends, Especially Challenge/Tourney weekends doubly so, as the servers apparently get overwhelmed. And some chassis seem to combine size, speed and geometry to exacerbate this. That said, this is not an "I hate FS9s" thread, lol.
No, just more curious WHAT people are experiencing with hit reg.
Most of the time, I will just have random shots not register, seemingly more so when I put a large alpha, but not always.
But the last few days, while this still happened (and I'm sure some of it was HSR saying sorry.... that mech wasn't really where your screen says it was!!), it seemed that it was simply individual mechs affected, with little rhyme nor reason.
I slaughtered a Catapult, then turned to deal with his little Arrow buddy. Pumped over 5 times the firepower (3x LPL and an ac10) and never even took his armor down below orange.
Last night, killed a storm crow, then ran into an Immortal Mad Dog, and put over 2 tons of ac20 into the guy, in a 150 meter death circle, firing the medium lasers, and never breached armor.
And this happened many more times. So it is seeming, on my end like for reasons unknown,(PING deviations between me and them, maybe?) I will just intermittently run into a mech that the Servers have deemed to be Morgan Kell with his phantom mech ability, and I simply cannot significantly damage it.
And no, I'm pretty sure I am not just losing duels to significantly better pilots, or I would not live long enough to expend that much ammo.
Also, this seemed far less an issue, though hit reg was still not perfect, in CW. So I am guessing the disparate server populations for the queues maybe affects it too? IDK.
What is your overall experience this weekend? (and for those not having issues, I hate you all, lol!)
Heh, Bishop: welcome to my world for the last... I dunno anymore. Pretty much since the inception of HSR.
I will write a summation of what is going on here, as after several thousand matches of seeing this one way or another, I consider myself an expert and what you are witnessing.
First- to the "I have no issues" and the "ping doesnt matter" guys: you are wrong, and you are wrong for reasons you wouldnt understand or be able to prove/disprove, because of the nature of the beast.
It is entirely about ping, but it is about the ping between you and your target, and more importantly, fluctuating ping between a target and you, and how HSR tries so hard to balance that. Combine that with server load, and load spikes during combat, and the poor poor overwhelmed server just can't figure it out.
About the issue witnessed: very very common for me. I have Frontier Comm. for an ISP. they are bad. My ping is 50 on a weekday morning at 9 A.M central USA. because nobody in my tiny town is on the internet, so the hub can handle it, plus Frontier knows if they F over the local shops with the net service, they will have to close the doors here. Anyway, when it gets busy in town, my ping will shoot up as high as 550. During a normal game session after work, or a weekend, my ping fluctuates between say, 250(really good for me, unlikely) and 450. usually between 300 and 450. It bounces, a lot. Some other players have this also, very few with ping that high, but some do fluctuate by 100 or more(think 50-150) while others fluctuate almost NILL. So, player A in his fluctuating ping around 125, shoots at me, and my ping spikes by 150 right then as I shoot back. HSR is now frantically trying to figure out just where both of us actually were at the time because latency is messing it up. Now you combine that with durations of fire, or multiple projectiles, and where the hits land gets even cloudier.
On HSR: HSR drives the meta. Every time PGI has adjusted one section of the HSR, it has resulted in the meta getting altered. When we were pre ghost heat, and pre JJ nerf, most of HSR was all pretty similar. The main difference was: lasers did 0-100% of their dmg(lets say it averaged 50%), while things like AC20 did all or none. PPC and AC were popular, because reliability dictated they would be more consistent match to match allowing try hards to hone in on the aiming. things like SRM were borked, LBX was in the same boat(and is still messed up IMO) and giant blobs of LRM were murder gank piles for some players and giant clouds of pillows for others. Why would that be?
because the ping fluctuations, and also very high ping in general, created packet loss. The current HSR can deal with stable pings pretty well, high or low, low pings pretty dang reliably- provided the target is also stable ping. Fluctuations mess it up, and the bigger the swings of fluctuation, the more packet loss HSR ends up seeing(well, not seeing really) which leads too:
dun dun dun...... certain targets being in god mode for you(or another player) but getting insta ganked like a tool by your team mate. Why? because the combination of ping fluctuation/packet loss between you and that invincible player hit some kind of voodoo magic grey area where HSR just says " know what, **** it you all miss all the time just **** off i give up". you might have 11 enemies that die a bloody death by your hand, but that one guy? NO F"ING WAY, just move on, let your team clean him up because ain't no way you gonna bust through his magic HSR packet loss shields.
How this applies most recently: Laser HSR, and SRM HSR are the last two things to see big overhauls, improvements etc. Suffice to say, the meta has also followed this trend. laser vomit and SRM boat brawlers rule the field, with a few sniper and LRM players with stable ping filling in the blanks. The rest, well, some have good HSR with good ping stability and shoot other players with the same, and dont notice, some just dont notice the bad detection, and then there are some, like you here Bishop(and me for a long time now) that do see it and have to play around it.
Laser HSR combined with duration shortening and quirks also making duration shorter, has made lasers do consistent dmg to a target, more reliable than any other system. The reason is they are instant hits(no travel time) and durations are short enough, especially smaller pulse, that packet loss is minimized. SRM detection, well the range is short so travel time is minimal, they move quickly, and whatever they did with the HSR last made them pretty reliable, mostly. I still see some missing dmg on extreme cases of ping fluctuation(I spectated some guy in his wolverine trying to SRM a (C) phract on terra therma the other day, took him over 80 SRM to blow an exposed side torso off the phract) but mostly they work ok.
On these targets that dont take dmg, lasers will USUALLY still work, though you will witness fucky targetting where the crosshair isnt red for the whole duration, or you need to lead the target a little, or even varying amounts. Streaks by their nature will usually hit unless you fire some 5x SSRM6 clan boat, then somtimes the HSR gets overwhelmed with hit counts. AC? PPC? Forget it, t's a crap shoot and the dmg wont count many times evenif you score a lucky hit on invinci-mech: its like part of it is HSR can't resolve where you and your target actually are, so the range gets messed with too.
Bottom line(TL;DR): the events DO happen, and you aren;t alone in this despite the nay sayers. they might not be able to verify because of everyone having a unique situation with ping and such. I have no advice for PGI, because I do not think their current servers, and possibly even the code or game engine, can compensate for players with pings between 5 and 600, with fluctuations in ping, packet loss, etc. I do not think the game can support having servers in each continent, and as long as there are players like me with Frontier.net playing, you are going to run into this situation until PGI makes a very big commitment to a big overhaul of HSR.
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