Now that I have your attention...

The devs can't do anything about lag. But even when fighting players with good pings (and my pin averages at about 50ms), Centurions still seem to skip around. Oh, and I get 120 fps.

Really fast ships are great, but when a pilot has a high but playable ping (say, 100ms), he becomes friggin' impossible to hit due to lag skips. It's frustrating, and kind of off putting. I'm finally getting the hang of fighting the new prom and now I have to deal with psychotic hopskip N3 wielding Centurions? Eesh.

My guess at the cause is that the super quick change of directions you can pull in a Rev C or an IBG happen too quick for the game to average out into something smooth with moderately high pings. If everyone had a perfect connection, it would solve things, but that's a pipe dream.

So the only solution to this, that I see, is to make all the light fighters start at 5000kg and adjust everything after that accordingly. I doubt anyone wants to go through another round of balance changes though so screw what I say. Fargh.

Has anyone had this happen to them?

this does result in a few other balance issues, if the devs fix this, they would then need to

A: fix the missiles accordingly
B: work with the velocities of blasters/ rockets so they don't become insane (215 m/s means a lot more when you can't move out of the way)
C: Do somethin about the AGT, its dodgeable right now (albeit a really boring wep), but if the cents were heavier, they'd be serious deathtraps

edit: my ping hovers around 80, not so much a problem

I have had this problem, too, but have also been this problem - and not in a centurion. I think that it may be a recent issue though because I didn't see it until just a couple weeks ago, except when my own connection was acting up. But then again, I haven't been playing very long so I don't have a lot of experience to compare it to.

Starfisher, I heard twice somebody complain about my lagging when I was in a Centurion MkII with Neutron MkII - 5600kg mass and not exactly superquick-turning. So if this was true and if mass affects the issue, it should be even more increased.

[edit: wait, I remember now another complaint - I was in an agresso (!) against a centurion]

Well if you actually are lagging, it's one thing. Then you're going to skip around no matter how heavy or light your ship is. I'm talking about the case when both pilots have pretty good pings and the ship is just too fast for the game to handle. Since everyone and their mother flies ships like that now, the problem is coming to people's attention more.

I fly a centurion and I've been up against a lot in the past few days and I've heard people saying that there was horrible lag but I didn't get any of it, everything rendered nicely on my screen, don't know my ping but I use comcast if that makes a dif. and I have a 32mb GForce nothing special. But I am running with 1.5Gb of ram.

I don't think we need another balancing patch, I really think it has to do with the client connection and not the design.

Another problem with this is that people will say you're lagging to save face during a fight, so it's hard to get a good idea of when it happens. People complaining about you lagging isn't a good way to judge it... but if you've seen a light ship do the skip you know what i'm talking about. Instead of a smooth transition, you get a sort of jumpy effect as the ship accelerates.

Note: The AGT is balanced for a heavy weapon.

Nerf the AGT, and you deal a serious blow to all heavy ships.

I agree with Starfisher, and I'm fed up of people just saying "well it must be your connection" or "get better hardware" etc..

The player base of Vendetta is worldwide, ok so you can't cater for people running on a 56k modem on the other side of the planet, but when I'm only in the UK on one of the fastest home connections I can buy here, then I think something is not quite right.

Ever since the Valk got its mass reduced to 3000-4000kg I started to wonder what kind of response time the devs are designing for, and now we have these crazy Cents... I'm sure it looks really nice and smooth on a LAN or < 30ms response time, but unfortunately thats just not real world conditions...

PS: graphics performance has NOTHING todo with this... I get 400-700 fps for god sake...

UD: I don't see how nerfing the AGT would have anything to do with skippy light ships... if it was toned down, it would be in the context of a larger ship balance patch

Remember the plans for a kinda distributed network anyone?

IE, someone in the UK could host a mini server, im not sure on how this would happen with v, but i remember it being mentioned, i certainly would give up some of my bandwidth to accomodate a better world wide experience...

I play with a 250 - 300 ping and occasionally see people warp around me. However most of the time it seems pretty good to me. Most of you have seen me in a Prom but I also fly a Rev C and an SGV.

I'm afraid I can't comment on the people with low pings, I've no idea what I look like to them. Just commenting that for those unfortunate sods with high pings the game still runs beautifully.

BTW Starfisher, If my suspicion is correct and you are referring to fighting someone in the CTC last night I think they have a 250 - 300 ping too.

I'm willing to concede, possibly, That AGT is balanced just fine right now. But I was just talking about the need to balance everything else. Something with excellent autoaim is going to be a hell of a lot better when everything around it is 2000 kg heavier

This happens all the time, even against pilots like Phoenix who claims to have a ~60ms ping. Only in ultralight ships.

I've only seen a pilot skip around once. I was fighting Spellcast and we moved into an astroid field. Things really got bad until we got out of the belt. I was amazed as I never had a lag issue before or since.

my ping is generally less than 40ms, and I see this from time to time, people with especially high pings are completely impossible to hit if you arnt lagging too, induce some lag though and its like playing one frame at a time with massive jumps inbetween, even though the engine runs quite smoothly. Due to the realtime nature of the game theres probably not a whole lot that can be done about this, since they still pass the server sanity check, they just arnt updating thier position with the server very often so you get tons of jumps. If your fighting someone how is lagging run away and let em knwo whats up, if they continue run to a station and get lighting mines.

hrm, with a ping average of 100 and between 50-140 fps i donn't really run into this problem except with infinate_skillz, ad even then it is not terrible. perhaps finnding a way to throttle the game a bit so that those with insanely low pings are brought closer to 100?

which brings my next question. what is the highest ping that will still allow someone to stay connected?

Martin.mac.au: "BTW Starfisher, If my suspicion is correct and you are referring to fighting someone in the CTC last night I think they have a 250 - 300 ping too."

If that's what he was referring to, I was there defending that CtC. I was within 100m of that cent while we fought it in Latos and heard the other pilots complaining. While he WAS a wiggly sucker, he did not appear to me to warp or hop in the least. I got quite a few hits on him, though I didn't make the kill.

Ahh actually I think you are referring to someone else then. That character didn't get hit. It would have ben before you left for work.

Heh, lets clear this up.

Martin: Yesterday I fought The Crow, who displayed classical lag symptoms (one place one second, 100m away the next and a stream of neuts where there had been none before). He confirmed that the had a high ping. What I'm referring to with the skippyness is not what he was doing.

FM and Martin: I'm not referring to any one pilot. I've seen it happen with many pilots. I'll try to describe the phenomena and why it's different from lag.

Take a centurion and accelerate in one direction, then change directions violently. You get a smooth, fast transition. When the skippy thing happens, it's like the guys thrusters are on a wave function like sin or cos - like the thrust is variable. So instead of a smooth transition, he kind of skips through it, going fast then slowing down for a split second, then speeding up again. When you are really close to him (100m, 125m), as it usually goes with these new light fighters, this makes him very hard to get a bead on. He's not where you expect him to be, and trying to compensate for the skip means you miss.

I thought it might be an artifact of their speed, because they never seem to be truly lagged out - warping from one place to the next, etc. It's like they have just a tad less than a decent ping, like 100ms or something, and the game can't smooth out the speed of the cent properly.

Anyway, hope that clears it up.