[rejected]

"Any type of invulnerbility is too easily exploitable, someone fires at you for instance, unplug your line, fly to the wormhole, plug it back in, warp."

Could you actually fly around while not connected to the server? I didn't think you could do this. Just curious.

i did play an online game before and this @#$ didnt happen. sure people lagged but they didnt get slaughtered for it. otherwise nobody would have played.. because it took you 2 hours to reach altitude and fly where you were going and everyone was on modems.

instant replay is not rocket science. they had it in Falcon 1.0 on my old IBM 8088 PC, which ran at a stunning 4.77Mhz and had a whopping 512 kilobytes of RAM and no hard disk.

dont look at EVE. look at xwing. tie fighter. good games.

---

tramshed first of all, you dont get to 'fly' while u are lagged.
the server tells u where u were and where u should be.

second of all, yeah, ok, if someone was about to die, they could
unplug. like i said, the attacker could report this as cheating. or like i said, statistics could be kept on unplugs/lags, and those who always do it when their health is low would be investigated.

as for unplugging then replugging to fool someone and get cheap shots off, well, thats what the 'your guns dont work' timeout is for when you come back from lag. you cant get off a cheap shot after unplugging; your guns wont work.

also, purposeful unplugs probably have a different pattern than normal lag. these patterns can be analyzed and detected. there will be a 'baseline' of 'normal' lag events. people lag when their ship is at various health states, in various sectors, loaded with various armaments, and in sectors with various random people or bots. anyone that deviates from this baseline in their lag gets a little 'closer look', their patterns are further analyzed. also some volunteers simulate lag-cheating, so that the cheating patterns can be analyzed. you can compare and contrast this way and narrow down who to focus on.

another thing is you log ping data. you modify the /ping command to continuously log data, then send the logs back to the server. you compare volunteers with honest lag to volunteers who try to fake lag via unplugging cables, running funny programs, etc.

furthermore, the client could set up 'pings' to other places on the network besides the vendetta server. it could ping the local router/firewall for example. if someone unplugs their cable, then the router wont respond to a ping. but if someone is having honest lag over the internet, then the router will respond to a ping even though the vendetta server wont.

furthermore the client could include a traceroute program
that would gather data on all routers between the vendetta
clients and the servers. then, during lag investigations, the clients could ping various known servers on the route. this will agin help detect the difference between some cheater unplugging their cable and someone honestly having a lag problem.

and finally, you crack down. bring the hammer down. cheaters first offense are banned for a day. second offense a week. their name is put on the website under a 'cheaters' link with all the evidence that points to them being a cheater. and third offense, they are toast. banished from the game. they get a nice phone call from the security guides informing them of their account cancellation, and a special envelope in the mail that says 'regarding your cheating on vendetta online' on the outside of it so everyone can see it.

----------------

OK, so it would be a mountain of work.

the only question is ... who cares?

well, i care, i think other people care. maybe joe blow
online gamer has grown jaded. but come on. nobody likes
to be killed in a game because of some random event
that has nothing to do with the choices they made or
the skill they have.

--------------------------------------------------

the only other solution would be to make lag 'part of the game'.
when you lag, it should flash 'controls inoperative! power
surge! inertial dampers failling!' or something on your screen, and your screen goes black. maybe when you come back, you have no guns until you actually redock at a station.

anything is better than the weirdness we have now... bots floating off not doing anything, you shooting at them with no 'boop boop'... followed in 2 seconds by your screen turning red and you blowing up, and saying "wtf? wheres my 50,000c ship?"

'nobody likes to be killed in a game because of some random event that has nothing to do with the choices they made or the skill they have'

Agreed.

You should also be invulnerable when your girlfriend starts yelling that you'll be late at the theater (much worse than lag, trust me)

What can we say? Welcome to the internet.

Tie fighter? Xwing? How are those MMORPGs? You even managed to miss the point of that comparison. Here it is:

EVE has 10,000 players LOGGED IN at any given time. You die from lag pretty consistently there. People get mad, rant, rave, etc. But then they go back to playing the game because when they calm down they realize that there's nothing that can be done about it. Why makes you think the Vendetta userbase is so much more immature and prone to frustration-related storming offs, and can't handle such a basic part of internet reality?

*sigh*

ananzi, just... stop talking. Please.

starfisher i dont think the eve players realized theres 'nothing you can do'... i think they just gave up!

the old mmo i played was warbirds, circa 1996, on modems. woot big fun. i havent played any MMO since. i see others play WoW and.. god, that thing is choppier than porky pig at a stuttering contest.

im saying, the aspiration should be to be as smooth as xwing, not say 'well at least VO is better than EvE'.

tyrdium if u have something specific please say so

random babblings of monkeys on crack only get one approval from me:

LOCKS OF SUPER DEATH SQUIRREL

X-Wing is a single-player game. There's no server to worry about, no latency. Do you speakey the English? No. Lag. Gah...

And yeah, I do have something specific. Stop ranting on stuff you've proven you don't know anything about!

> tramshed first of all, you dont get to 'fly' while u are lagged.
> the server tells u where u were and where u should be.
Wrong.

> also, purposeful unplugs probably have a different pattern
> than normal lag. [etc.]
Wrong.

> and finally, you crack down. bring the hammer down. [etc.]
So every time Comcast "interrupts" my service, I get banned? Nice plan.

> Stop ranting on stuff you've proven you don't know anything
> about!
Amen.
-:sigma.SB

P.S. I'd explain the reasoning behind my statements in more detail, but I don't think I could without being even more rude than I just was.

Sure you can fly when you lag, but it looks more like this:

Music glitches and the screen skips almost imperceptibly. You continue to shoot at player/bot until you realise there are no beeps. Everything begins to float. You realise you are lagged and try and get the hell away from anything and everything around you. You turbo through the asteroid field to 3000m, hope the lag has cleared. Set a nav, but are unable to warp. You hammer enter for a few more seconds, realise the futility and give up. Suddenly the music stops, the screen flickers back to where you were when it all started. You cant shoot or move and everything is in slow motion and floating again. Suddenly in the space of 2-3 seconds everything is replayed before your eyes. This is an experience not dissimilar to going through a tunnel on a train, or a rollercoaster. Music flickers and glitches. Health goes down. Screen starts going red. Another glitch then a splode animation. You are back in the station wondering what the hell happened.

When I got a free iMac 400 off a friend (thats right 8mb video ram o.O), plugged my crappy rural Australian below standard phone line into my 56k modem, quit every program to free up enough RAM, placed large table fan in such a manner that my poor iMac wouldn't overheat, and connected to a server on the other side of the world, I was really really happy that it worked at all. Even though I die repeatedly, and didnt know till a while ago that you could even choose the colour of your ship (I get a beautiful matt grey for everything), this does not limit my enjoyment of the game!

Ananzi if you feel lag is causing you too much stress, then maybe its time to re-evaluate why you play Vendetta. Otherwise I offer you my sympathy, and can we please stop discussing an idea that is so obviously flawed! However Sun Tzu was right invulnerability does have some very useful and more important applications than nerdy online games... (Isn't that why they make tequila?) :D

> Music glitches and the screen skips almost imperceptibly.
That sounds exactly like a minor temporal hiccup. That's not normal network lag.
-:sigma.SB

i suspect what we define as normal doesn't apply so much to someone whos connecting over at least 2 undersea cables or a satelite relay solra.

the potential for packet loss between australia and the US is just.. welllll.

Look, this is a topic that's been debated since we first opened the Test back in 2002. The problem is.. any insta-protection for lagged people creates a potential for exploitation. Solutions that work in games intended for small numbers of players are not necessarily suitable to a persistent universe game that might, potentially, have a few hundred players in a single sector. Analysis of packet behaviour to determine if a player is really "lagged" or not is a rather knotty (and potentially impossible) problem, and one which can still be defeated by someone smart enough to exploit the server analysis. Yadda yadda..

The solution to the problem, which we came up with way back in.. I dunno, a long time ago (Test 3.5.0?) was to have the server essentially "take control" of any pilot who ceased to send packets for a certain period of time, and do some basic AI stuff to take evasive action from attacks and pilot them to the nearest safe haven. Unfortunately, this "basic AI stuff" is non-trivial. Possible, yes, desirable, yes, feasable in the long run, totally.. but not a priority right this instant. I mean, our bot AI is still pretty dumb right now. This all needs work.

Having the server take control would essentially make sure that the "lagged pilot" didn't do anything that violated the laws of the universe (like become invulnerable). It would allow them some limited automatic defense (random movement, returning fire), and if they became "unlagged", it would be desirable to seamlessly let the player regain control. If they player did not return, the AI would do its best to fly them somewhere safe.

So, let me say.. this is something we want to do, and it's about the best we can hope for, given the inherently fragile nature of the internet. Any situation where you start to give out special abilities to people under certain circumstances may eventually lead to exploitation, and is, in my opinion, a generally bad avenue in game design.

Maybe if a player stops sending information, an AI will take over and do its best to evade all attackers for the 3000m limit, leave the sector for two random empty sectors and then log off (something like a modified and improved CtC transport AI). If the player returns, then the AI deactivates.

> i suspect what we define as normal doesn't apply so much to
> someone whos connecting over at least 2 undersea cables or a
> satelite relay solra.
If it's causing local tasks to "skip," it's not network lag, the problem is [probably] somewhere in the hardware. Faulty hardware will cause glitches precisely like Infinite_Skillz described. (I would know -- the exact same thing happens on my "melting" machine, which has no more network lag than my G5.)
To demonstrate this, crunch an Ethernet cable with the edges of a bookshelf for a few years and then try to play VO on it. You'll get some pretty weird lag patterns...but no "skips."
-:sigma.SB

well solra, i used to get very similar results on my machine when i used a dialup connection during the test. the local client attempting to resynch with the server after lag would cause:

skips in the music as the processor suddenly tried to handle 10 seconds worth of server messages at the same time;
short freezes and skips graphically for the same reason;
flashes of red as damage i had taken was suddenly re-applied to my ship;

when i switched to DSL (they finally installed it in my area about 10 months ago) using the same machine, all those went away because i am no longer lagging and loosing packets.

Hm. I forgot to account for the fact that VO's single-threaded.
Never mind.
-:sigma.SB

How about an optional Auto Combat bot. When used you do not gain any XP and it should not be able function unless your target is a bot. The user could have some settings to disable it and set lag threshold levels or even auto-engage if attacked.

The principle of implementation would be similar to autotarget, except you add maneuver control and targeting to the program. You could even have ships with different qualities of Auto-combat bots as a small balancing factor as with weapons.

As long as the bot is at least as good as the attacking bot, it could actually serve as precaution against cheat attempts.

By the way:

I know that some preXP Windows has some settings that can be adjusted to minimize lag on dialup modems. I know because I had Win2k and Win98 some time back and changed ISPs, the new ISP had serious problems with their ADSL line and I had to use ISDN for three months.

I do not remember exactly what I did, but it had something to do with package sizes and some other network parameters. I found the recipe at a tweak site (possibly tweak.com).

The point is that I almost eliminated lag and I could play Quake from Norway on servers in USA and still be a contender.