Just how bad is the client side issue?

I want to prefix this with I don't care about stats and I don't play for them and I while I am a long time player I am by no means awesome.

I have been playing a lot recently and I notice that often times in 1v1 gunfights I will drop many shots into a person (maybe head shots/maybe not) and I will see them fire 1 or 2 times and then I am instantly dead.

Many times this happens when I get the drop on or surprise the other player and I find it hard to believe that every time this happens it's because somehow the other player pulled off perfect head shots while being surprised and while being hit by me.

I know cheating happens too but I think this is not super rampant at this time. I think what I am seeing is the client side issue. Of course often times I am just outplayed but this happens pretty frequently and sometimes it is really egregious where after almost a full magazine I get shot 1-2 times and I die and they don't.

Just looking for some thoughts on this with the client side thing in mind.

You are experiencing clientside for sure.

Clientside tries to predict what all the other players are doing based on the last input your PC got. Often this means that when you "get the drop" on someone they actually turned around and started firing on you around the same time, but your PC hasn't gotten that information yet and isn't displaying it. Then when the update comes suddenly your PC has to catch up, and by the time your PC has predicted that a second shot is being fired your enemy has in reality already fired 5+shots at you, enough to kill you if there's headshots inbetween.
This makes it seem like your enemy insta-turns and does 2 headshots to finish you off. Often times even with weapons that don't actually kill with just 2 headshots.


You should consider the opposite side: Your enemies are likely experiencing the same thing. Every time you kill an enemy, that same enemy might think that you just fired 2 shots and killed him while from your perspective you felt like you pumped 20 bullets into him before he dropped.

Ofcourse this doesn't mean there won't be a cheater among them once in a while. But those would do this in more "open" scenario's as well.

Great info and explanation. Thank you.

Demigan explained it pretty well, no need for me to do the same.

There's also a few videos out there explaining it if you like a visual representation of what's going on; I can only seem to find this one, but there was another one on his channel explaining theoretical vs actual ttk if I remember correctly.

It's why if someone gets the drop on you, it's better you evade, heal behind cover, and then pop out to surprise the guy, with the clientside in your favor. Of course, there's always super laggy bois which will be basically impossible to damage, but its more rare.

Clientside-based issues is my only real feedback to the devs that keep this game from ever being truly great. Clearly there's exploits, and probably subtle cheats that manipulate it to favor a certain playstyle to great effect.

Why would I suspect as much? Because even now I'm still seeing blatant cheats like teleportation that should have been an auto-ban. If someone thinks 'it's just lag spikes' they've not played this game long enough to see what those can do.

As to the magic that makes the scale of this game possible with projectiles and without really dealing with what lag really does, yes it is very impressive, but needs way more polishing, monitoring, and adjustments.

None of this is to overshadow how skilled players can get with enough experience and learning, and those that are way above in ability, and the apparent super-human like reactions anyone can achieve at times if not consistently.

Winning or losing, it's all good provided it felt fair, and your own skill/strategy/etc. and the other players' was the real determining factor. Sadly it isn't like that in too many cases, depending on external factors like network load, population, time of day, and the latter mentioned issues. That's what I find really frustrating to the point I don't want to play this anymore.

Having a bad session or other faults that can be corrected or accounted for is part of the game's depth of learning and intensity, and I wouldn't want that any different. But the parts that are just downright nonsense, repeatedly and predictably so, that gets old and boring and not a true test of anything.

It's a necessary evil. There's a reason why the best triple-A games out there max out around 64 players, often not even surpassing 32 players in total in a single match. And it's because high player counts are a nightmare to handle in computer code. The latency system has it's flaws, but seeing how well the system can work whenever the server hamsters aren't too tired it's actually an extremely elegant solution. I would hazard a guess that most of the latency problems people experience are to do with the servers being underfunded and using a multi-year old game engine that has been patched up and refurbished too many times than with the latency system being bad.

^

Exactly, it's why planetside 2 is unique in it's genre. It's one of the few games that tries to push the limits of the system, despite it sometimes resulting in less than amusing scenarios. There's a few issues with the approach, but given the amount of data that needs to be processed in certain fights, there's no way the game would run server-side. Yes, adding physics rules to the extrapolation would be cool, but it's a lot of work, risks breaking a lot of things, and is pretty silly given how outdated the engine is.

A lot of problems aren't even due to the latency, but actually bugs. There's a few that were introduced with DX11, including one that randomly drops client packets in large fights. Obviously guys with higher ping are most affected by this, and considering most of the playerbase plays outside server regions....yeah.



I have tried suggesting to polish the game a bit more, but I don't really think it should involve playing with the engine. DBG devs tend to break more than they fix, and there's so much room for things to go wrong, I can't imagine what would happen if they tried tweaking the game's foundations. I think it would be better to rebuild the game from scratch, and upgrade to newer servers, maybe FLEX servers with as much RAM and processing power the devs can afford. I do also thing the game is limited by internet, and many times the game has proved they have issues with their ISP. It's not their fault, and I know picking between ISP in north America is like choosing between a used fork or a used spoon, but something also needs to be done about this.


The issue mainly is there's a lot of reasons not to do this, and the bigger issue is that one of these reasons is money, Planetside 2 has trouble monetizing players. A lot of people suggest to make the game paying, to avoid this. Problem is, players from certain regions like me, Moukass....would be unable to pay, unless they adapt to support payments from all regions. Additionally, there will likely not be enough servers to accommodate for player regions anyways. So you'll be losing a majority of your playerbase that either can't pay, or doesn't want to pay for a game that doesn't offer them decent connection. That means you've limited your playerbase already. Then there's the fact since people are paying, there's less room for blunders and unfinished stuff, which is one of the game's major flaws. Reworking the game this much is just too risky, and will likely cost more than it will return.

Considering how much players have become accustomed to these things anyways, it's pretty pointless to go through all this trouble to try reigniting a 8 year-old game that never made money.

As mentioned above, I suspect a large majority of these "cheats" are just effects of lag or buggy netcode. I don't blame the untrained eyes for thinking so in game, but it's important to take a step back and realize because it's clientside connection issues, sometimes you're the one cursing the laggy guy, and sometimes you're the laggy one getting cussed at on other player's screens. It's a tendency to thing we're the only ones effected negatively, but every ragetell I get, I can understand where the guy's coming from, at least in the non-ridiculous ones. Sometimes I get clientsided, sometimes it's others that suffer.

It's just something we have to accept, although I'll l agree it's definitely a shock for newer players, and perhaps what drives most away.

Just keep in mind, while it is possible to artificially manipulate packet loss through lagswitches, and run scripted cheats, very few people do (I mean relatively no one), and it's quite easy to catch these cheaters, they are dealt with.

First off, I gotta laugh at your name. Pretty ironic under the current topic at hand. Secondly, I kinda agree with everything you said except your last sentence. If there's one thing I hate most, its people downplaying or spreading false information about the games I love and play. There are cheaters in this game that have never been "dealt with". One guy named KINGJOSHUA on VS was under the ground multiple times in the past and I have even recorded him killing me while doing it. Sent the video and the report to Daybreak customer support and no response or outcome. Just saw him playing again a few nights back doing the same exploit under the ground.

Another guy on NC was killing people camping the outside of a spawn room in a biolab by magically shooting through multiple walls instantly. Then he claims it was "just lag sorry". Recorded him as well and sent the report to Daybreak and still have not received a response.

Of course not all these cheaters are using lagswitches but they are using some form of cheating or exploiting and they are still playing this game months if not years later. I almost forgot about this guy who posted a cheat video on YouTube years ago and even bragged about it in-game and he's still playing this game years later. I forgot his name but it will come back to me.

So...no, Daybreak doesn't care about cheaters. They don't have GM's monitoring the game anymore and the current devs are too busy making dumb design decisions with the new campaigns and mission system, etc. Don't even mention the useless BattlEye which basically is just bloatware that slows the game down and doesn't detect all forms of cheating. I even tried testing the anti cheat system myself by making a macro which makes me crouch spam 10-15 times with one press of a button. Even said I was using it in yell chat once and people were like "reported" or "you suck git good". Even had one guy literally harass me for an hour messaging me about how its against the ToS to use a macro like that. Still....no ban 6 months later.

My turn to laugh back. The gms don't monitor? Yet I've been banned, along with many other players, and a ton of players have been renamed last week as well. They are monitoring the game, banning people for "toxicity" and "offensive names". So that's the first misconception I hope you drop. Devs focus on development, gms/cs focuses on monitoring players. They're separate jobs, done by 2 different teams, where in most cases the dev team is bigger, because people prefer adding more explosions in the game than banning *offensive player name here*. That doesn't mean there's no mods, if you recall during the esamir revamp thingy the mods came out to ban the dudes using mentor chat, and unlock esamir.

There's 2-3 hackers out there, like in every game. There's a few more cheaters who take advantage of eexploits/bugs/whatever when they can. Nothing game breaking, and they are dealt with. If you recorded a video of what you think is cheating, and sent it to the devs which didn't ban that player....Guess what? The probability that player isn't cheating far outweighs your claim that mods let cheating go unchecked.


Macros aren't against the rules from what I understand, although they can't substitute for skill. I really doubt you benefited from using a crouch macro, but only you would know. Not really a great way to prove the uselessness of anti-cheat software. Try plugging in a scripted cheat, see what happens.

Cheaters post on youtube, and make new accounts when they get banned. Not much that can be done about that except constantly banning their alts, which the mods do.

I acknowledged the effects and limitations of the netcode, ping spikes, glitches and bugs. Those happen occasionally, and it is wise to brush them off. No system is perfect at all times. My experience is well trained with thousands of hours, with some dabbling on non-local servers, with varying hardware, settings, internet speeds, across all factions, under different scenarios of server states. That's not to say I know it all. There's much more to test, to log over time, but it's far from what one would call untrained. We discover on our own, make use of what others teach, and so build on the knowledge by sharing it with those capable and willing - and pass up the feedback to devs when possible in the hopes they sometimes read it and keep it in mind to improve future games of this scale.

The presence of blatant cheats, like those clipping through the ground, shooting through solid objects, rapid teleportation, one-hit ram kills, clear hitbox manipulation, to me indicates battleeye combined with player reports with evidence has a hard time keeping up, and therefore the subtle cheats must exist and are even harder to detect. I predict the use of seeing players through walls (ESP?) combined with audio-radar analysis (despite the faulty/unreliable audio) does take place even if its quite limited, as does some sort of controlled ping/packet loss manipulation combined with actual skill and strategy.

I don't buy the "it's all just lag, it's the game's code." If it were, it would affect everything and everyone equally and on large enough time scales even out the advantages and disadvantages, but that's not the case. Some scenarios and certain players have consistent advantages that can't be attributable to just high skill - the type that soak up way more damage and brush off way more headshots, that appear out of thin air, that jitter around effectively micro-teleporting, that move faster without active/passive movement speed boosts, that an entire room seem to somehow be oblivious to, that you also cannot ambush in the same way following erratic movements before peeking a clear flank. Again, this isn't to underestimate the many players who are exceptionally skilled, or occasional capabilities of even average players. This is about something that's extremely fishy that makes me believe it's both the lack of polish on the netcode and subtle cheats that are practically impossible to differentiate from high skill.

The whole problem with the "It's just Clientside, it's a double edged sword"... hand-washing approach is that MOST of the people who are saying it don't understand just how easy it is to manipulate that exploitable vulnerability in one's favor because they've never written Cheat code/scripts or seen just how loose Computer security actually is in most cases where it HAS to perform up to a specific Tick-Rate where 50 different clients are all bouncing very redundant but potentially Stack-Overflow causing Data if that Data were to be "Securitized" in the actual manner that they just assume it would be by default.

...think back to old Intel CPU cache exploit that used to exist and how long it took them to actually do something about it when they knew it was a problem for literally a DECADE. That's where we still are with a lot of MMORPG netcode and it's actually been TWO decades since they first realized it was a huge vulnerability /*(but they never realized just how easy it is to design your way around with the right kinds of gunplay and Mechanics changes)

Did you even read my entire post? I clearly explained recording people blatantly cheating/exploiting and still not getting banned. There is no "probability that player isn't cheating". Videos don't lie. 2-3 hackers out there in every game? Where are you getting this information from? Would love to know how you came up with those figures.

What were you banned for exactly? If you got banned for doing something bad then I am suspicious to what your doing here spreading false information and downplaying a big problem with this game. Banning people for offensive names isn't related to banning people for other things. Doesn't prove they are being "dealt with". At least not everyone. Just proves they are picking and choosing who to ban or don't care to ban everyone breaking the rules.

This guy is still playing the game under 3 different accounts.
So no the devs don't ban alt accounts, at least not all of them. More false information. I know the difference between the dev team and the customer support team. I've sent probably hundreds of reports over the years to them. Many with videos and/or screenshots attached. Only maybe a dozen or so of those have been "dealt with", as far as I know. They normally don't tell you the outcome and you have to wait and see if you notice them again in the game.

Macros are against the ToS. If you are using one button for multiple actions at once. A dev confirmed this way back right after launch in 2013. This new dev team probably doesn't even know about the original ToS or at least not all of it. If enough people reported me for using it then I should've been banned right? That's what you are claiming is being "dealt with".

Players with bad connections have an advantage over in PS2, those are probably the majority of what others think of as cheaters. You can look at the player's stats for head shot rate on auto weapons, but this is a horrible pastime and it may lead you to paranoia and to quit the game. One has to live with the fact that there are all kinds of internet connections, player's skills levels, lemon server days and the odd cheater here and there, like in every game. In this one thankfully they're extremely rare.

Hitboxes can no longer be manipulated. Access to those files is now restricted, and cross-checked constantly.

Players with higher ping will seem invincible and extremely hard to kill. Players from asia, in some countries are even forced to run the game through vpn. No need for me to explain how much that can advantage them.

I must disagree with the "subtle" cheats. The dude is either cheating or he's not. There's no in between. Artificially manipulating data is noticeable, no matter how small that manipulation appears to human eyes. The first thing you learn when hacking is that every infiltration/hack is noticed. There's no way around that. What differentiates each hack is the amount of time the hacker is allowed to roam around abusing the system, and what he's able to do in that time. So while it is possible to try to argue that some players take a while to get banned, or aren't punished as severely as others, it's ridiculous to assume there's people cheating that go unnoticed. Statements like this blatantly discredit your argument, because it highlights the fact you don't understand what you're discussing. A guy running an aimbot is cheating. Doesn't matter if he's aimbotting for 100%, 50% or even 0% accuracy. An aimbot is an aimbot, and will be detected. The only difference is the impact it has on players. A hitbox manipulation (which isn't possible) of even +0.000000000001% is a hitbox manipulation, and will be noticed when crosschecked. You're attempting to make us believe computers function like humans. That's not the case.

Yeah it's a game with so little pop and motivation for cheating, few people really bother to cheat, regardless of exploiting or hacking.

lol each time someone tries to enlighten us and explain there's hackers everywhere, they link this vid. Nice. The dude has been banned, and has multiple accounts, or at least doesn't cheat on his main ones. That's why you'll notice the dude is such a low br in the vid. IT's another scheme to make people paranoid, and scam a few ignorants who want to buy these "hakz".

I got banned 3 days for calling a cheater a c*nt. Ironically, I am usually the first to bully cheaters in game, and I tk, harass and bully them out of the game, before the devs even have to ban them (which they do usually under a day).

Show us your statistics, and anything else you can muster to prove I'm the one spreading misinformation and not you. Really, you think linking a video that's been reused to death substantiates your claims? All it proves is there was at one point a cheater, who played for 10 minutes and recorded a vid before he got banned. The battle-eye can take a bit of time, usually under 20-30 minutes to ban someone automatically. I'd like to see anything you have to prove your point.

Then you tell us you've sent 100s of reports, and only a dozen of them have been banned. You know what that makes me think of? I think you report everyone who kills you, and maybe one out of 1000 times, you died to a cheater. I think you'd be uncapable of recognizing a cheater if he shot you in the face. You just report everyone, and get angry the devs only take action against real cheaters, not everyone that kills you. Also here you admit the devs DO take actions. What's more believable? The devs ban cheaters, but only 2 or 3 of the hundreds you accuse, or you accuse everyone you see, and occasionally there is a cheater, which the devs do ban? hhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....I'll think about it, and get back to you on that one

If macros are against the tos, then someone needs to record you and send a video to cs where you'll get dealt with. They might investigate a player for reports, but they can't just ban a dude because a few angry noobs got salty, otherwise we'd be in the same situation years ago, where good players were forced to upload/stream their sessions because the community thought they were "hackers" - none of them were.

That's why we're not running the game server-side, and have adaptive tick rates.

And you're comparing an issue that affected millions of hardware, to a game where mods effectively have to monitor about 4k players on peak, often trying to use the same cheats.

I wish that were true - but you just need to join a cheating forum to discover otherwise.

As a moment in time example - right now there are 22 people viewing a Planetside cheating forum (this is a public forum - and they know DBG/RPG watch what they are discussing so can be quite cryptic these days) and just yesterday somebody publicly requested a hack.

This is a drop in the ocean compared to those interested in something like CS but then their gaming population is off the scale compared to PS2.


So despite the relatively low population - sadly - some people appear to be motivated (and i'll be the first to acknowledge that DBG/RPG have done an awful lot to try and stop these cheats).

lol forgive me but I fail to see how you bring anything other than validating my point. There's 22 people viewing a cheating forums. Of these 22 people, how many are people like you and me, just curious to see what's going on, or trying to research something and landing on this. Of those remaining potential cheaters, how many are actually cheating?

It's one thing to discuss robbing a bank, it's another to do it.

And lol, publicly requesting a hack sounds like the dude has no clue what he's doing; apart from getting bullied or scammed, I'm not sure what you expect is going to happen to him. Seriously, what is the likelihood of him receiving a working script from a forum where people are trying to be special and "secret" or whatever. You don't think the dude's gonna stand out? Lol, rest assured, I doubt that guy's gonna be bothering you in game.

From the fisu, our peak players hover at about 4450 for last month.

I'll make the (likely false) assumption that everyone who viewed that forum in hacking in game. There's some players I'm sure discuss on other forums, or don't discuss their hacks at all, so for all intents and purposes, we'll make that assumption that we indeed have 22 hackers actively in game.

https://ps2.fisu.pw/population/

That means they account for less than 0.0049% of the current playerbase. We'll inflate the number even more just to make it pretty, that's 0.005% of the playerbase hacking. I'm sure people aren't going to be happy with that number, so I'll further inflate the number, by making the unlikely assumption that these players are actively playing regularly, and aren't just part of the peak playerbase. Last month's average players were about 2230. That means the hackers account for 0.0099% of players, even if I round it up more than I already did, that's still 0.01% of the average playerbase hacking - far below even half of a percent.

Considering that's an absolute worst case scenario where the game is infested with regular cheaters, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say if you're seeing more than one cheater per session, you're either really, really unlucky, or you have no idea what's going on. Considering how rare it would be to encounter even one cheater during a session, you'll forgive me for instinctively thinking the latter when someone brings up "hacking" as an important issue.

Now that doesn't mean to let the few hackers that exist go unchecked, but complaining and raising awareness like this is a pressing issue is just crying wolf, and refusing to accept the game's faults, or that for whatever reason, you suck at the game. Actively going around trying to blow up unsubstantiated claims out of proportion is more destructive for the game than letting that 1 occasional cheater hack around for half an hour. Simply look back at all the previous drama that occurred over 19 different IP addresses modifying hitbox files. Literally everyone who landed a headshot back then was being accused of cheating, when in reality the game had less that 20 cheaters, at a time where player population was nearly 10x greater than now.

There's only so much that can be done to prevent cheating. I understand complaining about cheaters, but when you realize how little of the playerbase they account for, is it really necessary to exaggerate the issue? For what, to reduce the number of cheaters from 0.005% to 0.0005%? Seriously? The numbers are so low no one would even notice the effects, and people would still complain the occasional time they encounter their rare cheater. People would still complain about "cheaters" anyways, since a majority of these imaginary hackers originate from salty bois or just people unaccustomed to the game.

Perhaps we have a different definition of "few" or perhaps even on what a hacker/cheater is. But the game's in a pretty good state with this for now, I'd prefer the devs focused on solving actual issues, that would visibly make a difference on everyday gameplay. They will never entirely be able to get rid of cheaters, and there will always be people who see cheaters everywhere. But I can assure everyone that there will be a better experience if they improved certain bugs, cleaned up the netcode or whatever, than if they desperately tried to hunt down these 2-3 occasional cheaters.