unkillable players

Yeah it happens from time to time. Hard to know if its bugs or hacks.
This guy, https://www.planetside2.com/players/#!/8261280742798408593/killboard, killed me a short while ago.
I attacked him in the back and unloaded a shotgun on him. He does not die, turns around and kills me in literally no time at all.
I'd say all headshots... his stats are a bit much.

Also this other day I unloaded a LMG at a guy but he just wouldnt die... this guy was a heavy with a shield up and no weird stats so I am more inclied to believe it was a hit detection issue and that to few hits actually registered.

Might be that there are multiple issues causing this but strange stuff is happening for sure.

that fellow is either an aim bot user who uses his aim bot sporadically(doesn't show too much) or he's just that good (with a decent computer to boot). But no one is that lucky. This game isn't designed for one person to rack up a super high kill streak using only infantryside.

i've also noticed this and i play primarily as a light assault with a pump shotty, Bruiser to be exact. Some if not most players don't get OHK in the face anymore, like how it was a month ago. I knew it took more than 1-2 shots to take down a heavy, depending on the situation, and shield but usually less than 1-5 meters away, but now it seems i need more than 3 shots. It feels funky than a month ago i tell you that.

With all due respect - if you wish that the hit-detection was server-side then you do not know how server-side hit detection works.

-Stigma

Ok, may I ask that you explain it to me then?

Edit: I've now been told that there's a bug in game that gives players the same health pool as a max. If true, this may be the culprit of many of these " unkillable " instances.

Sure. If hit-detection was server-side then the client would only send data about where it shot. the server would decide if those shots hit anything.

That sounds good in one sense, because it would guarantee that no ********-shots would be possible around corners or whatever, and also it would be far less exploitable and prone to cheating.

The problem is that as soon as you have any sort of lag you would start to see instances of you on your screen emptying your entire magazine into a player and still getting no hits - because xxx milliseconds later on when the server received that information the player was 1 meter to the left or whatever - so the server judged that actually not a single of those bullets hit. Under such a system, even with just a few hundred ms the game would stop making sense and appear totally broken as the players you see on your screen are "not really there" and you have to actually shoot at the enmpty air of where you think they might be going next if you wanted to actually hit anything.

TL;DR - server-side hit detection just doesn't work with latency beyond that of a local LAN, and that's why nobody actually uses this system. As flawed as client-side hit-registration may be, it is the only realistic option to use until we basically get rid of latency on computer networks somehow.

These cases of "unkillable players" actually very rarely have anything to do with client-side detection - because clientside detection works on your behalf (as long as you are the one shoting that is). If your bullets actually connect on your screen but are not producing damage then usually something else is at work - like a spawn-invunerability state getting stuck, or the server denying the damage-packets due to lag or a bug or whatever. In such cases, having serverside detection wouldn't inherently have solved them anyway - even if that system was viable - because the servers hit-detection would be just as prone to bugs or traffic-hitches and whatnot.

EDIT: I have encountered both players (and for a period vehicles) that did not register damage. Thankfully it doesn't happen often.

-Stigma

I've watched as I pump round after round into a Liberator from an watchtower AA turret until the gun overheated, cooled down and then fired again. Liberator killed me and looking at the killcard he took ZERO, yes ZERO damage. So kill card bug or lag or wtf is happening. This isn't the first time I noticed this.

There was a period (a fairly long time ago now, many months) where aircraft would randomly become invunerable. In that period I saw that happen many times (and apparently it happened to me too other people told me via /tell). That got fixed though. I haven't seen an invunerable aircraft (or other vehicle) for a very long time.

Aside from the occational "player failed to load in completely" bug that happens in spawnrooms and at sunderers I haven't experienced any invunerabiliy-bugs for a long while - but I have certainly seen them happen before.

-Stigma

Yeah happens to me as well sometimes , server lag or just cheaters.

I was leaning more towards the bug/glitch side of explanations/PS2 being a complete **** tease as alot of messed up things seem to happen in this game. Like getting randomly redeployed after switching from utility pouch with c4 to nanoweave and claymores right next to an unguarded enemy sundy.

As far as cheating goes no clue. I've only ever heard of/caught speed hackers and aimbotters. Never anything like a god mode though. And for PS2, so far I have seen two people hack using speed hacks.

There is a small surge in hackers currently - there is no denying that. Maybe the cause is H1Z1 and hacks being developed there being easily portable to this game. Still, it started spiking not too long ago, and hackers have been fairly uncommon up until now (surprisingly so), so we will have to give it some time and see how it develops. Hopefully they just kind of fade away as maintaining the hacks become more work than it is worth for the programmers.

I have never seen any godmode hacks either, as you say. It may very well not be one of those things that are possible to cheat on. Cheats exploit the logic of the game systems, so it's not like they can magically do anything. Every cheater I have seen so far has relied on teleporting, being inside of walls or flying up in the sky + longrange aimbotting to protect himself. I have yet to see anyone who is obviously cheating be invunerable, so I chalk that up to bugs - especially since I've seen the occasional invulnerability bug happen to people who I "know" and have never had any suspicions of previously or after that one-off event. (as mentioned earlier I think I was at some point gunning for a liberator that had turned invunerable - unknown to me, until someone sent me a tell and i relogged to fix it)

-Stigma

Earlier this morning, I unloaded two shotgun fires closely into the back of a TR HA's head. His shields were not up, he didn't die and I can confirm that the pellets didn't miss him. He instantaneously turned back at me as soon as the damage was dealt and by the time he was finished turning, I was already dead. The death screen showed his shield bar was only 50% damaged.

Thank you for your patient and very descriptive post Stigma.

It may be that the max health bug on infantry is back. 3 times over the weekend, had the wtf where i emptied a jaguar or gd7f into the back of an LA at close range to have them turn and instagib me only to see that took only shield damage. 1 just ran right at me to shotgun me in the face as i put 30rounds into him.

But as others said, outside bugs i have never seen an invulnerability hack. Just bugs/exploits and some lagswitching to cause misses.

Had that yesterday in a 1vs1 Infi fight, i hit that guy 3 times with the Commi+1Knife hits didn't register though as if he had no Hitbox.
Told him he's a cheater, he responded that i was running in circles and didn't even shot...yeah right, actually i was running at him while shoting and stepping the ***** out of him no way the servers are that bad, after that he shot one time with his commi and i'm dead, headshot...

The other weekend there was a TR Sunderer on Hossin with two clanmates operating the guns. One was a BR99, one a BR100. After we defended the base and the defending zerg had pushed to their sunderer we could not beat it. The sunderer was completely invincible, it was perhaps 50-100 vanu against the two of them. They attained mabye 200 kills before the sunderer was destroyed. It was a parked, deployed sunderer with no other defenders except the poor innocent people who spawned there and got slaughtered and completely surrounded by hostiles, the c4 on it was mass tking people but not damaging the sunderer whatsoever.

As a HA I shot all of my decimator rockets directly at it and none of them registered a hit marker for me.

I have had this happen several times since I've started playing again a couple weeks ago. I'll come up behind someone, fire 30-40 rounds into their back, and then I'll see them start to turn and I die instantly. I get the same sound as if I'm OHK'd by a bolt action to the head, but it'll be from something like a carbine, AR or LMG. Then the death card will show them with maybe some shield damage.

I know I'm not some MLG player, it's not that uncommon for me to die when I SHOULD have won the fight. But I'm also very good at recognizing when that happens, and why it happened.

I'm glad this doesn't happen to me...

PS try firing into their heads, try even more if it's a heavy.

Anyway, if you post a video, I will be glad to have a look and maybe help you ...

I'll try to capture some footage in the next couple days and review it, see if I can't figure out better what's going on. Sometimes things look differently when you can slow it down and analyze it. If I can't figure out what's causing it, I'll probably post a video or two of what I'm talking about. It's not that uncommon.

Nope, they were moving; I shot them three times with the Railjack while they were running... I was like WTF! So chased them (in that amount of time they didn't use a MedKit)... shot them with the Commissioner a couple times, they didn't still go down so got close enough to knife them... and they STILL didn't go down.