[BUG] Upgrade Reporting Players: Died from 40% Damage

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Ketenks, Nov 7, 2018.

  1. Ketenks

    Hello, I am a new player to Planetside and I wanted to express my concern. I don't know how many hackers there are in this game. I don't know how the mechanics of this game works. But this post comes in two forms: it is either a bug or a hack but either way you need to improve how we report players to insure the problem can be understood and then fixed.

    I was killed by a Max unit from his right arm one time and I had full health and there was no other source of damage. We all know how it lists the two highest sources of damage and when I died it only listed the Max and his right arm at 40% damage. Now I had 100% health I know. So if I die then I must have taken 100% damage. So if the game thinks the Max did 40% then either this player has a damage modifier hack or the game is broken and doesn't understand what 100% damage is. I died to a single shot at that.

    Now when I reported this player I enjoyed the fact that it had the option to report the last killer. This feature greatly increases the accuracy of the reports on a statistical basis but you can do even better. I had a screenshot of the kill screen showing there was only 40% damage and no other source of damage. And if I could, then I might record my play sessions or even screenshot the very moment someone is cheating. But your in game report service does not include the ability to attach files. And so if you accepted images or short videos when we report people then this might be all you need for most of the time to immediately verify a cheater or not.

    If for any reason you can't implement this feature because it would bog down your servers then you have to create a dedicated portal in your website that we can directly port into through the game without having to log in at all to quickly do the very same thing through that portal.

    There must be some upgrades in your data acquisition to increase the likelihood of finding and determining hacks or just plain defects in the game. Make it as smooth as butter and easy as pie for us to report players with as much information as possible. That's it. Thanks for listening Planetside team!
    • Up x 1
  2. Trigga

    As far as i understand it, the death screen will only show you 1 source of damage per enemy.
    So if the same enemy damages you with different weapons, it only shows 1 weapon.
    You see the same thing if some1 shoots you with commy then stabs you with knife, only the knife shows as a damage source.

    You wont get any response the 'the planetside team' assuming you mean the devs.
    You might get a response from the 'community manager' or one of the mods, but i seriously doubt they know anything about the game enough to give you an answer.
  3. Ketenks

    So think about that for one minute. There was no other source of damage and yet it is supposed to list the highest damage right? But it listed the 40% not the 60%. Are you also saying that for a single player it always lists whatever they damaged you by last? I'm guessing that is the mechanic then. So he headshotted me with his left arm with 1 shot at 60% and headshotted me with his right arm at the same time for the rest of the damage? Could a Max inflict 60% damage with his left arm with only 1 shot? And even if he could then this still is a hack because of the way he got the shot off. I was running towards a barrier and I was right before the barrier as he passed it and not even a second passed and I died immediately. So if it is possible to do 60% damage with a headshot with the left arm then he must have had aim bot to get that headshot because I was running past him where we couldn't see each other until the last moment. ( I was an infiltrator no damage resistance)

    I hope the devs may somehow get a whiff of my concerns. I have to try.
  4. JibbaJabba

    I'm a bit of an expert in getting killed. Allow me to share.. :p

    I've seen this behavior before. The one damage source per enemy is one part of it. I've seen it occur with people that I know are not cheaters. Another part is what occurs if you take damage, health returns partially from some healing source then more damage is incurred. It gets particularly wonky if it happens more than once, and if a single player does more than 100% damage to you.

    I'm not even going to claim to know the mechanics enough to tell you if ABC happens then XYZ can be expected. It works fine most of the time.

    BUT.. I can tell you with certainty this: The display is flakey but the person that killed you was not cheating and you should not have reported them.

    Is there a bug? Maybe. But being merely a display issue that occurs in a corner case of circumstances do YOU really want dev to prioritize this above other bugs?


    As a new player there are some other things you should know so you do not get frustrated:
    There is a network timing and race condition that occurs with the health bar displayed for the enemy that kills you. The player health will only be accurate in limited circumstances during longer engagements. Do not drive yourself nuts fretting over that display!

    You also need to know about "clientside", headshots, and the players you are up against. I highly recommend finding a video on youtube called "surviving your third hour of planetside".


    Welcome to the game though, hope you're having fun!
  5. FateJH

    There's also the documented aspect of damage packets stacking up server side and being dumped on the client all at once. It really does feel like instantaneous death but - due to the whim and whimsy of the network - three bits of damage become one tremendous bit of damage. It can be enough to make anything feel like a one-shot kill. If it happens once every once in a while, separated by many instances of workable gameplay, then you're perfectly fine. If it keeps happening with but a specific person, we'll analyze that other player in terms of his performances or his "over-performance." If it keeps happening against everyone else, then we would have to diagnose your network connection to the server.
  6. Trigga

    Ever hear the phrase, 'dont shoot the messenger'?
    Pointless having a go at me for inadequate programming of the game.

    To answer your query, yes its the 'last damage source' from a player that it shows, not the highest. Ive seen it as low as 2% total damage.....
    And as pointed out, its not consistent, the death screen has been bugged since its inception.

    If you want to point out some1s aim bot, fine do it, but i cannot possibly comment on that without seeing a vid.
    • Up x 1
  7. Ketenks

    Ah that can explain a lot. Thanks for that.

    I see what the others are saying as well with the client side and combining this it makes sense why I see some pretty crazy kills. My performance is generally lower than other guys so they have an advantage in seeing me and getting all their magazine out. So what may seem to me like over-performance may seem to them as me under performing. Now that sucks. I'm just going to have to deal with it.

    But I hope that we would be able to report players with screenshots and videos because that could honestly clear a lot more players as well. But I see the difficulty in actually determining a hack if their overall performance doesn't exceed what a great player might achieve anyway. That's what kills games. They cheat just enough to get away with it.
    • Up x 1
  8. Demigan

    It is very very simple.

    You get 2 players listed maximum on your death screen. So a MAX with two weapons dealing 100% of the damage would only get one weapon listed on your death screen.

    The left bracket shows the player and weapon that killed you, even if it did only 0.1% damage. The right bracket shows limited info on the most damaging second player that is not, I repeat not the player that killed you.
    So logically if the MAX uses 2 arms and the one that deals the least damage (40% in this case) kills you, then that arm is shown. Of the arm that dealt the most damage killed you, that one is shown.

    You've reported an probably innocent guy.

    This also works for other weapons. In a 1v1 where someone deals 90% damage with his Carbine and finishes the last 10% with his pistol, only his pistol with 10% damage dealt is listed.
    • Up x 2
  9. Ketenks

    Yeah I see that. It was my expectation to always see a sum of 100% between what was listed as who damaged you. And so when it only listed 1 person under 100% I naturally thought something was wrong.
  10. Ketenks

    Overall, what rubs me the wrong way is that to some extent we are saying it was just some special form of lag. Yet my experience was completely smooth as I was running until I died immediately with less than a second of having seen the Max in my right peripheral vision. I had only enough time to judge that I would run right past the barrier and cloak and be gone but in that moment I died. There was no lag and the whole experience doesn't make sense. It's as if he had a damage modifier to kill me so quick with 1 shot or its as if he got the extra damage through getting a headshot with aim bot. That's all that could be possible from my experience playing other games. But I guess I'll just have to weather the game more until I know how it works.
  11. Trigga

    How close were you to the MAX?
    Was it an NC max with shotguns?
    Did you have nanoweave armour equipped?
    Were you using auxiliary shield?

    If it was a NC Grinder MAX, then it does a maximum of 780 damage per shot, with each arm, no headshots required.
    Each shotgun shot is split into 6 pellets (unless slugs are used), doing 130 damage per pellet.
    Both arms can be unloaded at once, which feels like 1 shot, but isnt, its 2.

    Lets say you were not running nanoweave, or aux shield, your health was 1000 (500 health 500 shield)
    Lets take a look at what could have happened:
    MAX fires both arms at you doing a maximum of 1,560 damage, it instantly kills you.
    Left arm hits you with 5/6 of its pellets, 650 damage done, or 65% of your health.
    Right arm also hits you with 5/6 pellets, doing the same damage, however, you only had 350 health left, or 35%.
    Death screen will show you being killed by the right arm of the MAX, at it doing 35% damage total.
    It will not show another damage source.
    Running nonoweave and / or Auxiliary shield will change these numbers.

    So yes a MAX will absolutely take off 60% of your health with 1 shot of 1 arm, it can do even more (78%).

    EDIT: Additional comment:
    When people talk about lag, they are usually referring to the fact that what you see in game happened a half second ago, so sometimes youre dead before you can react, even if you do react on your screen.
    One of the many drawbacks of the clientside system we have, but a necessary evil as far as i understand it.
  12. strikearrow

    Just because you weren't lagging doesn't mean he wasn't. This game has client-side hit detection so the game server can handle so many players (more than any other game as far as I know). However, it means that if player A interacts with object B (player or whatever) on screen, then that information is sent to the game server and the game server sends it to object B on everybody's computer. The "new" information is not checked by the game server to see if it's in-sync with the real-time state of the game.

    The problem is that this the information is stored on player A's computer until it can be sent to the game server, then it is stored on the game server until it can be sent to object B on everybody's computer. The game server doesn't check to see if players are still connected to the game server as often as information is sent. If there is a significant time gap - lag - on the connections, but not significant enough for a disconnection, then people have less or no real time to react to information on their screen. This happens because during the time of the "lag" information is stored on the lagging computer until it can be sent to the game server so by the time it is sent to everybody's computer it is out-of-sync with real time and everybody else gets a jolt when they are informed something happened that they didn't see happen (such as when the lagging player turned and shot them).

    Computers can be disconnected for 4-5 seconds, maybe more, before the server stops attempting to send and receive information from them. As you can imagine, when 4-5 seconds of game play is updated to everybody's screens they receive quite a jolt. Teleportation, tons of damage, etc. It's often less, but even 1/2 a second of damage to you by the lagging Max could kill your character.

    Other games tend to have fewer players on a team so the game server receives information from everybody, syncs it, and then sends the processed information back to everybody. E.g. the game server decides if a shot from one computer is in-sync with the position of everybody else to score a hit. It means that if a player lags, then they will not being shooting at where a person is located - at the time they shoot - and will miss. This method requires the game server to do more work and Planetside 2 has too many players for this method.
  13. JibbaJabba

    ^--- What these guys said.

    The network code in planetside will 100% hide latency from you. If you see someone, and shoot them, it absolutely hits. But it's all a trick. It's being hidden on the client side.

    The trick unravels in certain spots..... wait until you successfully duck behind cover but then die anyway. You'll swear the guy cheated. He didn't. On his screen, he got you.

    Also know that veterans know how to make sure this creates an advantage for them and not for you. See also
  14. Ketenks

    Thanks for those last few replies. That settles it. Im glad to understand the mechanics of the game and what I need to do to compensate. That video was well done and makes complete sense. I hope the devs look at my other post for putting in moving targets in the training room because that would be greatly needed to start doing better at this game.

    What I understand is that defense is more important than ever in this game. Getting to cover faster is more important because in their view they are seeing more of you than you are experiencing being hit. These are the drawbacks but I guess the gain is that everything is smoother for 100v100 game play, real battles.
    • Up x 1
  15. JibbaJabba


    In VR, leave the firing ranges and go out into the fields. The targets spawn faster there. Do about 10 minutes of "reps" each day.... just get your gun of choice and... ratatat..Headshot, next target, headshots, next target.. Go clockwise target to target, then counter clockwise. You are just building muscle memory. Record yourself and watch it. Are you bursting? Over/under aiming? (mouse sens)

    Moving targets may not be as useful as you might think. Just work the muscle memory here. No substitute for live play.

    As far as cover...Yeah, if you take damage your chances of being able to spin, aquire a target and win are next to zero. Dodge (with sprinting and turning, NOT strafing) and get to cover ASAP.

    Overall though playing defense will put you at a network disadvantage. Play aggressive. YOU be the one that comes out from the corner and initiates the line-of-site. This will buy you a free 150ms before people even see you. If you have to hold back and defend a corner, peek it to gain that "client-side", then retreat, peek again... always make sure if you and another player see each other it's because of a movement that YOU did.

    Being aggressive like this sounds easier said than done to a new player, but it is the path...
  16. Ketenks

    Good advice. I will start thinking this way.