Forums » Bugs

I'm sometimes unable to damage bots...

Jun 20, 2019 ultraopgamer3000 link
Situation is:i decide to go do some botting, i go into one sector, and everything works fine, then i go to the other sector, with same weapronary, same ship and shoot same bots, but this time, even when i hit them, I do 0 damage... I'm not sure is this even a bug but I'm still very confused.
Jun 20, 2019 incarnate link
It'd be helpful to know exactly when and where (in the game) this is happening, along with a little info on your platform.

When you do a "/ping" in game, what do you see? It can be more challenging to hit enemy ships, if you have a high ping, like a satellite connection, or if you're pretty far from the US.
Jun 20, 2019 ultraopgamer3000 link
This happened first time when i went to play the "Help Rouge Queen Detected" mission. I completed the mission first time and i wanted to do it it one more time, since it was good fun. However, the second time i tried to shoot the same escorts with the same weapronary (this time in a sector with asteroids in it) it simply refused to take any damage. As for the location, it was somewhere in Latos, u can't quite remember the exact sectors.

My average ping is about 90ms and i play on Samsung galaxy s7 edge (Exynos version).

-Thanks!
Jun 20, 2019 incarnate link
Were you on wifi, or a cellular connection at the time?

Basically, what can happen is, if there's a big increase in packet-loss or "ping" time, and you client starts telling the sector-server that it "hit" something a particular point in time, the sector may disagree and nullify your hits if they're too far away from reality (and the sector is authoritative for "reality" across all players in that game location).

To put it another way, your view of the "game world" is always slightly de-synchronized from the sector's view of the game-world by the amount of latency (ping time) between you and the sector-server. You may claim that at 12:00:00 you hit bot A at position 0,0,0 in the game universe. But the sector says "hey, wait a minute, at 12:00:00, bot A had already flown to position 0,0,100" and was 100 meters away from where you claim you "hit" it. Basically, your "view" of the world had become too de-synchronized due to latency, which is one form of what players tend to generically call "lag" (and is a terrible catch-all term for everything from ping time to low framerate).

Because this is a long-running, heavily proven MMO, there's a lot of "leeway" in that difference of "reality" that will still allow you to hit something, even if you're at a 500ms ping or higher. But, if you temporarily get too far "out of whack", your hits may not land.

Packet loss is a common culprit.. if a wifi router or cellular node gets overloaded, or if you're transitioning between cellular nodes, you might just have packets get dropped entirely. If those packets contained the messages "hey, I hit this bot!", they may be lost and re-transmitted later, when the protocol realizes they're missing, but then may arrive "too late" to be in the sector's view of "history", or how far "back in time" it's willing to look to see if you might have hit something previously.

If I had to guess, you may have just briefly had an intermittent network problem, that caused your shots to not-hit temporarily.

If this is something you continue to see happening on a regular basis, please do let us know, and we'll dig further into it.
Jun 21, 2019 ultraopgamer3000 link
Thanks for the quick and detailed response!

I played the game a bit more and for now, this is not happening anymore.