-1 auto fire is sometimes the only option to fire on a raw phone. Plus if you didn't want a messy match you shouldn't have shot the latency player.

Of course you'd say that, as a completely unbiased player in philippines confined to android.

This handicap that Inc gave you in order to keep you around.... is a "right"?

Seems to me that you don't really understand what the word means.

It's a legitimate concern of mobile players to have their capabilities nerfed. They are, after all, the majority.

I don't believe greenwall is being sarcastic, so I'm going to agree with him.

Do I play on PC: mostly.
Have I been killed countless times from others lag: I believe so.
Do I have a problem with it: Hardly any.

For as many times as I've had invisible rounds or giant fused lag flares kill me, I have twice as many times been able to kill a target because of their lag. Figuring out that your target is a mobile user you know that without mouse look they will be murdered by flares, and their slower load times make it so you can get the drop on them in any multi sector fight. I've encountered the odd player who my energy rounds seem to not register on, but again have found that those same players half the time will freeze still in space and become literally the easiest targets in the game. It can suck for those of us that record the game for videos, as there are members of the community that can ruin the fluidity of action, but there are trade offs for having as large a playerbase as we do.

PS, if your hits aren't registering, I find leaving and grabbing some swarms to spit at them s usually a sure fire way to either explode them or make them lag out. Won't be your proudest moment, but brings a little satisfaction.

When you're forced to swarm in order to hit anything in a game that takes pride for being twitch-based, you know something is wrong and/or broken.

Well I suppose you've got me there, it's why I didn't give an up or down to the OP. But when the discussion veers towards blocking the laging players I disagree with it.

-1. I don't think this is a good solution. The main problem with laggy people is hitting them, not dodging them. Dodging is trivial; just don't move in a straight line.

When you're forced to swarm in order to hit anything in a game that takes pride for being twitch-based, you know something is wrong and/or broken.

exactly!

-1. I don't think this is a good solution. The main problem with laggy people is hitting them, not dodging them. Dodging is trivial; just don't move in a straight line.

This suggestion is about mitigating effects of auto fire aim bot in combination with teleportation lag Rin.

Most PC players are here for a long time and I somehow doubt any of them fights by moving in the straight line. Regardless of your dodging, teleporters autofire aim bot hits you with invisible shots and I based my suggestion on this fact.

I really have no idea if the solution I proposed is plausible until Raging John chips in with what he has to say about this.

The main problem with laggy people is hitting them, not dodging them.

Yep.

I'd be happy with a connection indicator for your target. Say a bar under their name going from green to red indicating spikes and high ping connections.

+1 to Ore.

Sure it could be numeric. I agree and plus ONE Wally.

And what exactly does knowing someone else's ping accomplish? You can already tell if someone is lagging beyond acceptable bounds by the teleporting phenomenon.

Okay, so, there are definitely problems that need to be resolved, and I am in favor of putting time into what I think are the correct problems to go after (improving the lag-awareness situation by displaying recent connection-history info per-player, and/or perhaps doing something like temporarily reducing the damage-ability of laggy players against other players only, or some other mitigation that's across the board for all players). I do not think this mobile-specific proposal is the right thing to go after..

In all 4 cases auto fire aim bot works perfectly and actually hits their opponent with high level of precision.
I presume (again, not a tech wiz so correct me if I am wrong) server calculation on where PC player with a fairly good connection will be is pretty much accurate so regardless of mobile shooter teleporting around auto fire aim bot uses the server calculation to hit the target.
PC player, on the other hand, targets manually, simple auto aim adjustment we have also uses server prediction of where your mobile opponent should be but... in 90% of the cases mobile player teleported and he is not where server thinks he is.

VO does not have anything like server-based auto-aim, or any kind of server-side prediction that is then sent to the client. The mobile players have the same auto-aim as everyone else, which is based on the client's best-guess using client-side predictive interpolation. So, if they're lagged, and their packets are delayed, then they'll be making crappy auto-fire mis-predictions based on where the client thought you were. That doesn't mean that some of those shots might not land though, if they're lucky.

Also, at the time when a latency spike occurs, shots you see will have been sent by the remote client before the spike happened, so they may be pretty accurate before they suddenly become bad, but because of the inherent latency itself, it may "seem" like it was after they started lagging, because of certain network optimizations we do for linear weapons (like lasers.. things that are spawned once and then never change trajectory, and are thus perfectly predictable).

It's more likely that Raging John specifically and purposefully introduced this as a handicap for lagging mobile players.

No, I added auto-aim because mobile players do not have three thumbs. And after play-testing for a while, I decided it was unrealistic to ask mobile players (especially newbies) to manually fire their weapons. I managed to play it like that, but it was more than I would ask of a new person. So, whatever, we added auto-fire. I wasn't super happy about it, but I considered it reasonable versus the tradeoff of playing on a tiny phone. And, at the end of the day, not likely to be a make-or-break change versus a PC player.

Raging John had good intentions when he..

Okay, so above and beyond all the relevant content in this thread, can you guys please chill with the "Raging John" thing? Maybe just stick to "Incarnate"? That's getting to the point where it's going to confuse newbies and otherwise be a negative influence on the game.

Not to mention it's super ironic. Bojan started saying this after I banned him from Bugs for being unrepentantly unhelpful (for months and years), frequently reporting theories without any data, intensely dialing up the drama level of his reports based on his incorrect conclusions, starting purely drama-related Bugs threads, and then when confronted about it.. being unwilling to change his behaviour. Now, at the time that I was supposedly "raging" about this, I also wrote:

If someone wants their status reversed, they can submit a support ticket making the case that they understand exactly how they need to behave from now on, and I'll take it under consideration.

So, while he again mentions in this thread he has no access to post on Bugs, that's his choice, because he never wanted to send a support ticket to explain that he understood the requirements of Bugs and that he would adhere to them in the future.

What is the most ironic though, is that I have a decade-long history of being excruciatingly patient with Bojan. He's been a really long time user, and I value that. When we changed datacenters last year, and he reported his pings were worse, I actually reached out to the people who control routing for our upstream providers and had them do an analysis against Bojan's IP address, and they were the ones who found his local ISP was doing some goofy asymmetric routing that was causing his problems. I don't think I've ever asked for "personal routing analysis" for any user of the game, ever, nor will I likely do it again.. but I did it for him. So for all the accusations of my "rage", I've been patiently explaining things to him and going way above-and-beyond to try and help him for many years.

Still, if an individual pollutes Bugs with a lot of melodramatic and wrong content, and refuses to improve their behaviour, at some point I'm going to have to remove that person. As I wrote in a public, personal warning to Bojan (thread linked above), months before he was banned from Bugs:

I am only interested in investigating reported issues, and resolving them, as quickly as possible. That means, that all I want here is data. Any melodramatic crap that gets in the way of that is unwelcome, and will result in related people losing post-access to the Bugs forum.

We simply do not have the luxury of the signal-to-noise ratio falling here, the way it does elsewhere in the forums.

Anyway, moving on, I think there's probably more value in migrating to a new thread (or revived one) about general solutions to problems with lag-teleportation, regardless of platform.

I mean, if we need evidence of Incarnate's exceptional patience with the more recalcitrant and irksome amongst us, need we look any further than my continued presence on the forums?

Ok Incarnate, what is your suggestion for laggy clients with deadly accurate auto-fire (whether mobile, perceived mobile, or PC)?

Instead of us guessing what the problem is, why don't you tell us and then fix it?

Well, one of the ideas I posted above was that we degrade the amount of damage a given user can do in PvP (only against other players) while their ping is highly variable. So, basically, the server would need to detect that they're in kind of a "degraded state" (jumping around), and it would make their weapons do less damage to players at that time. This would only count for weapons that are actually aimed (energy, rockets, projectiles).

I'm not really sure if that's a good idea or not, it's just a thought. There are some other things that can be done too, with generically holding people in place if they jump around too much, the problem is it really makes their PvE (NPC combat) experience terrible.. and doing some damage-based thing can at least let us weed out PvP specifically and let people have their laggy-but-fun PvE on their phone from Tokyo or whatever.

Anyway, I think it might be better to start a new thread, since this one is dedicated to a very specific concept.

Thanks for taking this under consideration Incarnate.

See? Didn't call you Raging John this time but frankly it's just a harmless pun, even Whistler called you that in few of his posts.
I know Murphy's Law has a special place in it's heart for developers and you are no exception. It's ok to vent out sometimes.

On that other matter... You know I will never send that support ticket and you probably know why.