Why this game drives me crazy...

7 bullets. 6 misses. 5m away.

The CoF is so wild every bullet misses the red mark where my cursor is, and my cursor is relatively smooth across the field aiming for his head.

The person shooting me, in every one of the pics, isn't even aiming at me. So what I see is a person looking and aiming to my left. Before the 8th bullet leaves my chamber, I'm dead. I have no control of when the actual bullet leaves the chamber.

Time from the time I see him, to the point of death? .4 seconds.

Looks clientside-y to me. And it looks like most of your crosshair wasn't on him. As for him not looking at you and still killing you, no idea. Frustrating as hell though, happens all the time. No idea.

From his POV he was probably looking right at you. Cof is wonky as hell. Since you didn't hit him much, overshield still active AFAIK, didn't lose any health.

How come no one hipfires that close? More reliable to ADS?

This happened when you stopped moving and then ADS'd in that order?

What does this even mean?

That's how long you saw him on your screen. For how long do you think he was looking at you on his screen? (No, you're not allowed to cite his lazy rightward gaze.)

Must go for dem headshots.

I agree. But that's because at the moment the bullet left the chamber I wasn't. But I also kept it in horizontal line with his head the whole time and still would have missed. Look at where the bullets landed. My aim was irrelevant.

I ADS and move the entire time.

Here's what I remember, my first shot ticked me off almost immediately. Look at the first one. It's like right in between his gun and face. After that I immediately start taking damage from someone else, or so I thought. I thought maybe it's just a friendly. But nope, the guy I saw first, who wasn't looking at me, damaged and killed me and my attempt to keep my gun level didn't matter. Perfect aim on my part would have still resulted in up to 7 bullets missed.

COF would be MUCH worse. The gauss is bad.

When **** like that starts happening (getting shot while the guy is looking the other way, not missing due to COF) I reboot my machine and reset my modem and router.

Pure anecdote but I always perform better after a reset. It really seems to help with the weird shenanigans planetside2 tries to pull on you.

The Gauss SAW has a perfectly accurate CoF for the first shot fired. If you missed it's either because you were sprinting and didn't allow ample time for your sprinting CoF penalty to settle (it's a ******** mechanic but it ain't going anywhere unfortunately), or because you flat out weren't accurate enough with your aim.

After 6 rounds, the CoF becomes too large for my liking, so I tend to try and limit my bursts to that many rounds.

The rest can be explained by clientside shananigans.

If you look at the first picture you can still see the COF cross on his screen, so he opened fire before/while going into ADS.

Some people here fault him for not being extremely good with his aim. But looking at the COF, not a single bullet but the last one would have hit if he had aimed perfectly at the head all the time (which is exactly why aiming for the head is a terrible idea with any weapon that has a moderate COF outside of extreme CQC!)

Basically, the gauss early shoots straight and I have a fast connection (50ms) which results in a very large likelihood I'm going to be penalized a lot for being out of cover.

Seems like between clientside lag, CoF, and all the hacks, getting kills in this game is certainly not skill, but chance and luck. That's why I stopped looking at my K/D as a reflection of skill and just spam gunfire.

The faster your connection, the better.

If two players shoot eachother and enough damage is registered at the server to say "player x is dead", then all damage that comes in after is discounted.

So if you and your opponent start firing at the same moment and you have a 50ms ping and your opponent a 200ms ping, then you have a 75ms window (200ms for a signal to travel to the server and back to him so 100ms to get to the server and be registered, and 25ms for your action to be registered, means 75ms left) in which you can damage your opponent before his hitmarker from that same moment arrives. So even if your opponent manages to kill you first, theres 75ms of time in which you can score a kill and still survive!
Ofcourse theres a bit more to it, as you should actually count from the moment the bullet is fired and not landed. If the bullet was registered in-flight before your killingblow lands its one of those draw-moments where both die.

But anyway, lagging only works when you use lagspikes to basically queue your movement and hitmarkers, or to enter a room and start shooting at enemies that dont react to you yet. That is an advantage, just know that your enemy still has the time it takes for you to enter and kill him to retaliate and potentially still kill you and have his kill register earlier than you, it just takes a little time before you actually experience it. This can result in the famous rants of people who aim at a guy who isnt even looking at them and feel they get killed in only 2 bullets (this is experienced both by the lagger and the normal guy depending on who's killingblow got registered first).

I know exactly how you feel. The CoF drives me absolutely crazy. I hate it when RNG impedes skill.

I hate it when people think that keeping in mind/controlling COF/RNG isnt a skill.
Try trigger discipline.

CoF exists regardless of trigger discipline, except for in very rare cases like the SAW's first shot.

If you aim down the sights, CoF starts the size of a pin for all weapons. It blooms slower than when hipfired too. The first shot for all weapons is almost always the center of wherever you are aiming.

Your first 4 shots were terrible and you missed even if you had 0 COF. I'm also not of the opinion you would have missed all 4 of your first 4 shots if you'd been centered on his head. Your last 3 shots could have been hits if you'd let off the trigger for even an instant - COF settles on the gauss very very quickly.

Blame it on the game if it helps you feel better but then you won't get better. It's absolutely not random in the sense that you have no control over it; otherwise people would never reliably hit anything outside of 30m which is absolutely not the case.

Anyways. This guide has a ton of great information on planetside2 infantry weapon mechanisms. I started to write my own stuff on managing bloom and recoil but he goes a lot more in depth

http://iridar.net/planetside2/weapons/weapon-mechanics/

Regardless of the technical cause, this specific type of battle experience ("I shoot first and bullets miss where aimed, they shoot not even at me and hit me lots and I get killed") is what drives tons of (most?) people to not like the PS2 Infantry game, and not want to play PS2. It is non-intuitive with regards to what happened vs. what should of happened and why, and there are other FPS games that don't have this same problem/experience.

Those are WHEN the bullets left the chamber. I have just as many if not more frames where my cursor is right on his head.

That's the point.

I understand you're frustrated because this strange shooting situation occurred but we're explaining the things that can happen in this game and, in many cases, why that thing happens. This isn't something we're pulling out from under a rock to aggravate you. These mechanics have been rigorously tested by a variety of people, and Iridar's notes are probably the most significant. I'm not going to rule out a catastrophic failure of the projectile trajectory system for this particular engagement - hey, it's this game - but the only thing I can say its "oh well; respawn and move on with your (next) life." Unless you have evidence leading to this failure being replicable or that it is systemic, there are two options: this is either a one-off happenstance or you were doing something that didn't abide by the rules of cone of fire management.

Video would probably have been a better medium for this. The sum of visual and audio cues leading up to the encounter and during the encounter would better with the examination.

As for the last part of your screenshot collage, never trust killscreen information. It's notorious for being out of date or just uninitialized.