83 replies to this topic

[OlF]

This put me off the game 2 patches ago. After reading the forums I thought i give it a try with Open Beta now.
First game was really nice, good team ... smooth (edit: only shooting big clumsy targets). Next match I had to go back to the our base and defend, Jenner and commando there. While i was hitting the fast mechs on the screen, no damage registered. When I was leading the target with lasers (I shot at dirt) the targetinfo showed me damaging hits.

So I am back to idle status with MWO again. Would appreciate a heads up from you guys when the situation changed. It doesnt has to be completly solved but if a change is worth testing let me know, or make this thread sticky.

Edited by OlF, 31 October 2012 - 01:22 AM.

[Bluemaxx]

here is a tip that i have put up in other threads about this. It's not the perfect solution to all the hit detection problems but it helps when you come up against a fast moving target you can't hit. Remeber we need to adapate to the game as it is right now, i'm sure PGI is doing what they can to help us but for the time being we need to work around it.

"try running tag on your mech while fighting these "lag shielded" mechs.

Fire the tag infront of the enemy, basically leading the target, until your cross hairs to turn red, once you see them turn red unload with everything you have. .
This is how i've been overcoming the netcode issue, which is especially bad for anyone playing in my part of the world...."

[Mordin Ashe]

Agreed, it needs attention from the devs. Scout hunting with my swayback is somehow less viable and I don't like it. 130-140 ms latency should be fine, but it isn't. Of course I could switch to my LRM boat, but it makes only a marginal profit compared to swayback since the c-bills for damage are ridiculously low while I need to rearm after every match.

But lets be optimists, PGI is rather responsive to issues of the community and lets hope they find a solution.

[OlF]

Thx for the "fix" Bluemaxx, but I am not that addicted to MWO yet. I will wait for a company side solution.

Funny thing also was that when I started playing (around 10 am PZT) it was much better than to the end of the session apro. 2 - 3 hours later. At least it felt like that, no evidence there of course.

[superbob]

So to sum it up, it seems we have at least 3 distinct problems blending into one, + an extra issue.

• Lag shield/basic hit detection issue. Just to recap, testing revealed months ago this gets worse proportionally to server load.
  
• Hit detection on shutdown mechs. Basically the client not updating the position of some mech.
  
• Mostly undetermined issue with damage feedback on paperdoll, internals taking damage for no apparent reason.

• Additionally, there's the issue with random/very hard to determine ballistic fire delay. Once the projectile is fired, it is subject to all the above conditions.

Issue one is the one I'm most pissed about, since it made hitscan/projectile weapons hard to use, and they stayed that way. IMO makes proper evaluation of the game impossible, since 2/3 weapons are affected by a serious bug.

Number two seems to be another form of what occurred when:

• Server didn't handle a player disconnecting properly (early beta, fixed now, was mechs walking in place, had to shoot in front of them)
  
• Mechs collided and fell (mismatch between client/server side physics sim)

My guess is that it's caused by the way mechs now don't shutdown in place, so you see a mech shutdown and make a few steps, while server-side it's still right where the shutdown occurred. [edit: also, this may have something to do with the rubber-banding that happens if you try to run through a mech - instead of colliding you run through an Atlas, then get reset in front of it, repeats until you stop trying]



Third issue is new to me, I haven't observed it often enough to have a good idea what my cause it. My guess is either heat calculation mismatch or packet loss, or both + some other unknown factors. Seriously, with a game this bugged and rushed, possibilities are endless. The fact QA missed an obvious missing texture that shows up on the CAT-K2 arms doesn't inspire much confidence in internal testing.

On top of that, now that we're in open beta the environment doesn't really cater to careful testing of the game. There's simply too many people who want different things, most of them not akin to letting someone shoot you so they can get a feel of how the lag shield works in this patch.

I'm willing to test the game, but it's too buggy for me to want to play it!

Edited by superbob, 31 October 2012 - 04:05 AM.

[GaussDragon]

Bluemaxx, on 31 October 2012 - 01:28 AM, said:

here is a tip that i have put up in other threads about this. It's not the perfect solution to all the hit detection problems but it helps when you come up against a fast moving target you can't hit.

I think I'll just wait until they fix it.

[Circles End]

I agree with the rest of the posters in this thread, that this pretty much needs to be bumped to the top of the list. Even LRM effectivity scaling exponetially is a minor kink compared to this.

[Apolyon]

Next time your in a heavier mech and you have a light circling you to death. PAY ATTENTION to which of your lasers register on his damage and which do not. I recently had a jenner circle my awesome and none of my lasers were registering damage on his mech readout for armor even though I was hitting him on my screen directly and his armor was glowing as a result of the hits...

But for the most part its satisfatory.

[I AM MECHWARRIOR]

Personally I have had quite a few hit detection issues myself, including one instance whereas I was moving in the same direction as a Catapult and shot an ac right into his core. It went right through him as though the shot didnt exist. There was absolutely no damage whatsoever and this issue needs to be addressed, and my ping is always at 40.

Edited by I AM MECHWARRIOR, 31 October 2012 - 06:55 PM.

[Melcyna]

Apolyon, on 31 October 2012 - 06:53 PM, said:

Next time your in a heavier mech and you have a light circling you to death. PAY ATTENTION to which of your lasers register on his damage and which do not. I recently had a jenner circle my awesome and none of my lasers were registering damage on his mech readout for armor even though I was hitting him on my screen directly and his armor was glowing as a result of the hits...

But for the most part its satisfatory.

Visual Hit effect does not represent actual hit at all...

what does represent a hit on the target more reliably is the cursor, if it turns red you scored a hit (usually)...

Americans don't notice it as much as others NOT in US since obviously latency for US players would be sub 100ms at least.

but for those with latency above, the effect is magnified several times over... with visual hit effects being completely worthless as the shot had to be lead ahead of targets by up to several dozen meters on fast light mechs depending on latency, which naturally produces zero visual hit effect. So we all used the red cursor as the indicator instead of a hit which itself isn't even reliable but better than nothing since the visual hit effect is completely worthless for high latency in determining a hit.

Prior to this patch the problem already existed but was not to the same degree as it is now after the patch... now it's near impossible to hit a fast mech reliably with any weapon short of guided weapons like streak and LRM, doubly so for anyone with significant latency... hence why Streak and LRM are all over the place... ppl don't have a choice, they r the only weapons that can be relied on to hit since everything else is affected by lag shield.

If this last patch made the visual hit confirmation more satisfactory for those with low latency (which doesn't seems to be the case as ppl reported clear desync with latency in 50ms range which is ludicrous), then PGI effectively decided to screw over anyone not living in US, which means they are either suicidal since i cannot imagine an F2P surviving in this age and time in that manner, or they seriously failed hardcore with the netcode and interpolation mechanism design

[Captain Commander]

I run at about 16ms lat. consistently. My aim is both accurate and percise on the move, over hills etc. Now me at a full stop in my Laser Hunch w/ 3MPL and 6SL, Alpha strike a full stopped Jenner directly into the core of his back, yeilds 0 damage. The Jenner runs off.

Edited by Captain Commander, 31 October 2012 - 07:50 PM.

[GaussDragon]

Captain Commander, on 31 October 2012 - 07:49 PM, said:

I run at about 16ms lat. consistently. My aim is both accurate and percise on the move, over hills etc. Now me at a full stop in my Laser Hunch w/ 3MPL and 6SL, Alpha strike a full stopped Jenner directly into the core of his back, yeilds 0 damage. The Jenner runs off.

I run anywhere between 23 and 60 ms. I've shot at immobile mechs and done nothing for damage. It's ridiculous.

[Melcyna]

Then it's kinda clear that the game is very badly out of sync between the client and the server...

how can the interpolation is so badly handled that ppl with less than 50ms latency can see it clearly is beyond me...

it's almost as if the game has a misaligned interpolation...

[Cest7]

I've noticed many targets take direct hits, start glowing and take no damage.

I've also notice shot with a ridiculous lead to miss but still do damage.

Something is fubard.

[Melcyna]

That they take hits and glow but can suffer no damage is normal...

ie: the visual hit effect and sound you see is CLIENT BASED, and this is to be expected since things like visual FX, sound, player movement (ie: YOU yourself) should be instantenous or near instantenous in order to appear responsive.

what is NOT NORMAL is the fact that the game interpolation is COMPLETELY fubar when it comes to where it's supposed to render the mech and thus the mech are seen in a position that does not correspond to where they are server based, or where they SHOULD be based on a decent interpolation.

And this is what give rise to the problem...

ie: normally the players are rendered based on where the interpolation mechanism estimate their position should be based on the known data so far received (ie: if someone is travelling at 50kph in a straight line the interpolation system can estimate where he should be a second later if he did not change his vector).

That the hit effect are client based is not a problem if the interpolation works because it should approximate where they actually are, thus even if the ACTUAL damage hasn't occured yet in the server but has already been rendered on your client (assuming you shot someone) it doesn't matter because a split second later the server should acknowledge the same situation and register the damage. This can sometimes miss in that if the player latency is MASSIVE then the interpolation eventually fails and can result in teleporting players... or similarly if the players can move VERY VERY quickly and changes their vector rapidly then the interpolation can also fail at predicting the movement.

But these are accepted limitation of the mechanism... what we are seeing in MWO however is that for some reason the mech render itself have either faulty or non existent interpolation.

[FrupertApricot]

even with sub 90 ping shooting other low ping players i have to lead at least one mech length ahead.

[Postumus]

It might be a good idea for the devs to rethink what gets handled on the client and server sides. There is obviously a hacking risk when more responsibility is handed off to the clients, but there are fixes for that, such as punk-buster-like programs and active moderation of the game/player reporting. On the other hand, unless the net code gets many times more efficient and PGI gets multiple new, more powerful servers, expect only incremental improvement. Only tasking my overpowered gaming rig with displaying the visuals is a waste. Let me take some of the server load, I'm begging you.

[Melcyna]

Server load is not an actual issue in all likelihood... calculating the trajectory for the weapon and all, and determining the hit etc... is TRIVIAL calculations as far as the computer is concerned, be it our gaming rig or the server machine, plus the server does not actually need to run the client itself... ie: the server does not need to actually waste processing power for rendering and all.

The issue is in SYNCHRONIZING what the client sees and decides, with what the SERVER think is happening...

and this is where we run into problem with letting client decides things...

If for example the shot on a projectile is based purely on what the shooter client determine... then if he has say 100ms latency with the server, then the time it takes before another player with similar 100ms latency sees and acknowledge the damage is 200ms, with twice the latency disrepancy between the time when the deciding shot is taken (the shooter client) and the victim client. This is not too bad if both players latency are low, but CATASTROPHIC if not since the victim can end up seeing things grossly outdated to actual situation.

So the shooter sees no latency in his client when he fire his weapon, but the victim ends up seeing twice as much latency between the time when the shot was decided (shooter client) and when it's ACTUALLY registered on the victim's client.

And this goes both way, if someone with 500ms latency fired on you, even if you had 50ms latency the end result is that you will still sees 550ms disrepancy between the shot and when you see it happening to you.

If however the shot is decided based on SERVER decission then the shooter sees a 100ms latency between what he sees on his client and the ACTUAL damage occuring (since it's server based). While the victim ALSO SEES 100ms latency between the time in which the damage is decided (the server) and the victim's client rendering it. (assuming both players have 100ms latency to the server).

ie: in a server based decission, both the victim and the shooter sees only the respective amount of latency to the server between what they see and what is actually happening.

Plus with it server based, you are immune to other players latency effect for the most part, all that matters is how much YOUR latency is to the server.

So using server based decission for them is understandable, what's NOT ACCEPTABLE is how grossly out of sync their interpolation is which is supposed to reduce the latency effect on the desync between what is actually happening and what the players see on his client.

Edited by Melcyna, 01 November 2012 - 11:04 PM.

[Evgeny Bear]

Well they want us to spend money, but I cant enjoy my yen lo wang if
1. my bullets just hitting randomly dirt
2. IF I can shoot straight where I aim at (and that almost never happens) my damage is not deal'd
3. I only get random kills, with my bullets just going somewhere, and maybe hit something.

maybe I should build in an LBX-10.... so I can at least deal somekind of damage.
aww yeah

I love the game....

[Airwolf]

Last night I encountered something 'weird' ... after reading most of this thread, I'm assuming that it's this 'lag shield' and/or the whatnot. ...

Went scouting in my Jenner while the rest of the team went for base rush ... encountered an enemy Jenner way out in the middle of nowhere ... we 'danced' for about a minute blasting the hell out of each other ... both Jenners glowing pretty well ... my team won by capping first ... end screen ... ZERO damage done ... UH WHAT!?!?!?!