[BUG] Shooting Through Walls

I was just killed by a a light assault where I had no previous damage. I saw him, he saw me as he was up the stairs flying. I went behind a box wall and stood there with my pistol. He started shooting while he just got off the stairs, could not see me and he was shooting through the walls. This is not like I was being shot first and then he finished the kill because of the oh so great client side hit detection. No, he could not see me at all. And he shot me through the wall before he could see me.

If this game doesn't have fair encounters for some reason then it's not worth playing. This is the first reason I've been given to quit this game. If this is how this game works, where my experience is basically invalid then it's not worth playing.

I wonder how it plays with a great graphics card and cpu. But I have 50 ping, 80 latency and a "Good" connection through ethernet. So there is no reason why my experience in this game should by anything but fair. And this encounter was either a wall hack or this game needs to seriously fix itself. I don't care if this is a "totally acceptable mechanic due to server side infrastructure" and "a necessary drawback to the client side set up." If this game can't create FAIRNESS then it is a dead game in my perspective. I'm not going to learn the ins and outs of the code of this game in order to take advantage of whatever mechanic there is so that I'm better off. I want it to be FAIR.

Please consider changing whatever you have to, to fix this and if the culprit is client side hit detection then I'm sure there is a way around it. Thanks for listening.

It's called lag. Get used to it.

So you're telling me at 50 ping, 80 latency and with a "Good" connection, at 50% render quality and Very Low graphics, with 20 audio channels and only 800 render distance I have to experience lag? I know what lag is like. I've experienced lag many times and it visually gets slower. Everything moves slower. That is why it is called lag because everything is lagging behind.

So I had nothing moving slower. It was NOT lag. I know what lag is and I'm telling you there was NO lag. My complete experience was complete SMOOTH game play but I got shot through the walls...that is NOT lag. That is crap server side code, a bug, or a wall hack. It is not lag!

It's not you lagging - it's him.

With client side hit detection, it doesn't matter how good your connection is. If he was lagging really badly, it's quite possible he could have been seeing things 2 or 3 seconds behind what you were experiencing.

From your perspective you had already moved behind the wall, from his, you hadn't yet and as such he could still shoot and kill you.

Of course he could have also been cheating, using wall hacks or lag switching. You'll probably never know unless you catch him in the act again.

No, he was not seeing me at all. He had to come all the way out in front of the wall to finish me off. So unless it was a hack and he knew he needed to sell the kill so he only started shooting me early and then he could blame it on whatever crap code this game is based on.

We need open policy about how this game works to understand what is going on under the hood so that we can know what a hack is or not. I'm not going to play a game where the user experience is invalid, especially when it is as competitive as it is. Currently this is not a hack but a result of how this game is coded. Fix this game and then maybe I'll play it again.

I'll probably get back on it after a little while to give it another chance. But this is the problem: how am I supposed to know how many kills are legitimate at all? Do you understand? Maybe even my kills are simply because I had server advantage for that moment. If I sniff that this is that kind of game then I'm out.

I understand. This is a casual game and whenever you become competitive you'll feel frustrated because this game is simply not good enough for competitive game play.

The best experience I've ever had with FPS PVP is with the Halo series. They did it right; both the ranking system and the server side code.

If you were extremely good at the game then you won battles. And when you won battles your rank went up and you only fought players within a short range of your rank. This was completely simple. The rank was based off of performance and your rank would go down if you started losing a lot. It was a completely fair system.

Then the server code made it to where everyone was on completely equal ground as much as possible. If one person was slow, everyone was slow. And all they had to do was keep the cut off fairly high and ensure that the games had good life. But when it was good, it was completely fair and good. You lost because they were better than you. Everyone had the same lag. So even in lag kills you knew it was nearly a 50/50 chance that anyone would get the kill.

That's how Planetside needs to start thinking. Sure, it may suck to boot a bunch of players that are simply too slow for the game but the overall game will improve drastically and everyone will know what are the minimum requirements to play it and not get booted.

That's all there is to it. Maybe with 100v100 battles it simply isn't possible you might say. But I don't believe that for a second until it's tried. As long as the cut off is just right then it should be possible.

I think the other guys are right about your enemy lagging. Sadly it was probably on purpose as well. Lag switches are pretty popular these days.

On another note, you're computer doesn't sound like it's doing too well. Have you tried disabling particles completely? You've got some funny settings by the sound of it. You shouldn't need to lower render quality unless you're running integrated graphics. I've got a friend with a 2 core cpu, 8 gigs of ddr3, and a 500 something nvidia running 2k graphics that gets 40 frames in 24-48 fights.

Then it is the server's fault. There should be no reason a server should be set up to where players get an advantage through lagging. That's completely ridiculous. You can't possibly tell who is cheating that way. Oh man, I am done with this game. That right there proves it. Sheesh, Warface on steam is better than this game in terms of its mechanics. But this game is high caliber in comparison. What a sad situation for Planetside.

It's like a super car but underneath the hood you've got a steam engine.

Yeah, things aren't looking too good for this game. Daybreak is continually blocking the ways which lagswitches work, but there are just so many ways to do it that they're fighting an uphill battle. The ONLY solution is introducing code that discounts all damage when a client's connection is too slow. I don't blame the servers though, or clientside, or reasonable lag, it's entirely the way this game is programmed. On top of that, Battleye needs to start validating more files on startup, even if it takes a couple minutes to start up the game. I won't get in to any specifics on this forum, but there are just too many loopholes and workarounds. Another issue, is the ability to just start a fresh character and go right back to cheating if you're caught. There needs too be an auto-kick feature if a low BR character does unexpectedly well if it isn't linked to a high BR alt.

That would be a perfect solution. That's like soft boot and it should show up as a small notification that they are too slow to damage people. Easy.

That is a self contradicting statement. You don't blame the servers but it's entirely the way this game is programmed? That's blaming the servers. And you are right to do so. It's entirely the server's (developer's) fault. They created this situation and they are the only ones who can get out of it.

I suppose it's somewhat semantics. But I think the issue of eliminating high ping damage needs to be dealt with clientside, and those lines of code need to be strictly validated by Battleye. Servers are already taxed heavily enough. I don't know if it's possible, but since validating the entire game is unreasonable, it would be nice to see a random file selected to be validated on top of the critical files during every startup, just so there's always a chance to catch a cheater manipulating some obscure file. That random chance is enough to keep most high BR's from gambling their account for a small advantage. They could also have validation occur in the background, during lulls in combat when your PC has power to spare.

Great video. I really love the stuff Cyrious puts out. I would love it if he were in Wrel's position. He also mentioned that DBG took account age in to their autoban calculation. It's sad to see that solution abandoned so easily.

It's because he would actually fix the game if he were but those changes are just too controversial for the developers.

What's next? We all have to supply a federal ID to link to all our accounts? Anyone can lie about their age when creating the account.

I think the only solution is to pull out the steam engine and put in a jet engine. They have to kill client side code and make everyone in sync. Boot the slow players and it should play smooth.

They're willing to make controversial changes. Construction and the new alerts are evidence of that. Cyrious has always had a very reasonable and logical approach to things.

Age of the account, not age of the player. Most of the hackers that cause substantial damage are low BR players on new accounts. So account age is a very important thing to consider.

You're still making a false correlation between ping/smooth running game, and cheaters. They simply aren't related. Place blame where it belongs.

As far as shifting away from clientside, we just don't have the technology. Battlefield has been trying hard to get more players on each map, but they haven't been able to push it past 64. Planetside 2 having 300+ players going at it at once is a monumental achievement, but it comes at a cost of shifting some of the burden to each player's machine, which is why clientside will always be a thing in this game. The cost of all those players and the corresponding loss of performance is just something we have to deal with, no two ways about it. If you NEED a game that runs as smoothly as Overwatch or CoD, PS2 will forever let you down. Keep that in mind and be realistic with your expectations.

I don't know about how it all works. I imagine there is a work around. There is always a work around. I just don't think you can have an FPS game where lag can be taken advantage of. That's a game working against itself. I don't see anything wrong with the client bearing some of the load but it has to be done differently where everyone has the same shot. If I see you, then you can see me and vice versa but they are breaking that one golden rule about fire fight combat. And that's just heresy to me for an FPS game. You just can't break that golden rule of an FPS game. It's just not what you do. They have to fix it or I'll only play this game as a joke and for funzies for a while until I quit altogether.

It's the same as every other popular shooter out there. They all use clientside hit detection. If you've ever played a game with serverside hit detection, you'd understand why that is. The other key thing to think about is the overall framework of this game. Other games have few players on many servers spread all over the world. Since planetside has 1,000+ players per server, it's inevitable that there can't be as many small servers. Fewer servers means less ideal connections. You have to take the good with the bad. PS2 simply can't be as tight as other shooters. The blatant ping manipulation from your OP, the recent hit box modification problems, players getting inside and shooting from objects.... That can all be fixed. But it's pointless to hold this game with so many players up to the standard of a 12v12 game.

Yep - I suggested something similar a few weeks ago.

Given the client tracks ping and latency in real time, it should be fairly trivial to scale weapon damage based on these.

If your ping and latency is within an acceptable range (say below 100ms), your weapons do 100% damage.

If ping and latency start to climb, the damage dealt reduces linearly until it eventually becomes zero at say 1000ms. Anyone with ping and/or latency above 1000ms (e.g. lag switchers) would do no damage.

The golden rule of all FPS is: if you can see them they can see you. That should never be broken and should always be preserved in every encounter. That is the game's job. If client side hit detection breaks this then it's not good enough. You have to mitigate it with some different framework somehow.

I don't think that's accurate. Stealth has its place. Planetside has cloaks, while other games have concealment. A better rule is that the ability to cause damage should always have a balanced risk associated to it. I have zero problems with Stalker infils, for example, but I have tremendous issues with spawn room bursters. I get that you're picturing lag wizards, but that's not intended, and universally detested.

This is naive in the extreme. This game is limited in a large part by its age and the technology of its time. At a certain point there is a ceiling to how much you can do without overhauling the entire game, something I doubt very much DBG have the money or inclination for.
Even so relative to its peers this game has held up well. Consider that Battlefield 4 released a year after PS2 and look at the dumpster fire state the clientside was in that game at release.

Lag is a factor in every multiplayer game where the internet is involved, and it can be abused in many of them. As long as an exploit is possible it will be done until it is patched. Since patching is reactive by nature, there is always a period between which an exploit is known and when it is fixed, and between that fix and the next exploit.
Spend some time learning a programming language and you'll gain a bit of perspective on what you're asking for. You talk about putting a jet engine into your supercar not realizing that you're actually asking to put it into your FIAT 500. There's only so much you can do with what you have available.

This is your golden rule, not an genre standard. Headglitching shatters this rule to pieces and it is in pretty much every FPS game out there.

This is a video game, if "funzies" isn't already the only reason you're playing it then you are doing it wrong.

In the end, they will do what they can, which is fix the exploits as they can and keep the game running smoothly to the best of their ability. They have already done a lot; adding a new server to address the large number of high-ping players on Connery, for example. But you are never going to have your buttery-smooth, 60-120hz, ~15ms connection that you have on Overwatch or CS:GO, and expecting it is fantasy. No amount of programming wizardry is going to fit that V12 into your FIAT.
waits patiently for someone to post a link to FIAT with a V12 crammed into it and ruin my analogy