[Suggestion] Is it too late to move Sniper Rifles from Infil. to Engi.?

While I have no doubt that the delay/latency stuff is a core issue (I routinely get killed by infiltrators and see them decloak post shot) your timing is way to long. The only way it takes that long for end to end travel is if you were going across cellular or across the ocean. Maybe you are including processing time at each hop? But even then I don't see it. If activity updates were almost half a second off the game would be unplayable in my summation.

Typical ping time is 50-200 ms (putting aside extreme cases). You need to go to machine A to PS2 server to machine B: in PS2 you "live in the past" because what you see on the screen has happened already someplace else. That's the reason why whoever peeks from a corner has an advantage because he/she can see (and fire upon) the others before the others will see him/her.

And even that illusion works if you have a constant stream of packets to keep all the other players aware of the direction in which a player is moving. When this stream of packets has gaps, the game tries to compensate by interpolating the movements of other players given their history: an effect mostly noticeable when there is a big de-desync and you see other players standing stills like statues or floating in the sky.

But without reaching that extreme, it is constantly happening if you pay attention: I have seen countless cases of players dying into a spawn room (or behind a wall) because they had been killed "before" taking cover but the kill was not notified.

I look at all of this, and then realize..."they think HESH is an Anti-Personnel High Explosive round",

First off, please understand i am not at all trying to pick a fight. We are simply having a discussion about numbers. A fight is not fun, a discussion is.

With that said, I 100% agree with you on the effects the lag/latency causes and how rampant it is. I see funny stuff like you mention all the time. However, I think you are incorrect about ping times. I would think folks in the same region might top out at about 100ms (round trip) while those from another region might be in the 200ms range or higher. If people were waiting a quarter to half a second for responses the game would just be broken vs annoying. Clearly this is the case for those with super high ping times coming from different areas of the world than their server. But I just don't think this is the case for the average player. Again, the way the core client works is an issue because the latency and decision making causes problems and oddities.

No problem mate but I am not 100% sure you understood the steps. If you say 100ms round trip we are saying the same, the rest is time needed to draw something on your screen and finally to react, We humans reacts to a stimulus after 100-400ms and more depending on a zillion of factors.

While your brain is processing "Holy **** there is an infiltrator decloaking in front of me on my screen" the bullet from his Daimyo may already be on the way of your avatar on his screen"

That is why high alpha damage weapon are deadly, most of the times you won't have enough reaction time before being hit by the first bullet.

Edit: you aware that the game engine is so broken that high RPM weapons are actually under-performing if FPS is not high enough? ps2 is full of quirks but we are so accustomed after a few years that we do not even notice, we adapt

All this discussion has proven is that PS2 simply cannot be a MLG competitive game because of clientside. It never truly measures player physical skill. It's more about knowing how to manipulate PS2 weaknesses. In reality using clientside peek, render, or de-cloak advantage is no better than people who abuse terrain bugs and hide inside terrain to shoot people walking by. It's really all the same - knowing how to take advantage of a game's weaknesses.

I remember the days when I played games where outfits would kick members who used any of those advantages - shooting through terrain edges to minimize exposure time, bouncing a grenade off a leaf etc.

We are sort of talking apples vs oranges but I think we are in agreement. I am talking pure network time and you are taking into account screen draw time and human reaction time.

So I get what you are saying but whether you are playing COD or PS2 the reaction time and the draw time are similar on the same PC. The issue with PS2 comes in with the network and client decision time meaning that there is a lot of time between Client A doing something and Client B seeing it given everything in-between them.

Actually, even beyond the timing I think there is a second issue which exacerbates the first. The game (much like a VOIP call) depends on a constant stream of tiny bits of data. Let's say a few of those bits come out of order, really late or just don't make it. The game continues to function but you might see jumps in time. I think this also heavily contributes to the weird stuff we see.

Again, I think we agree on the issues and were just taking it from different angles.

To a degree I agree, but some of this will always be used whether you intentionally ride the wave or not. Try playing the game without ever turning corners, for example. Also there are people with genuinely bad pings - either because their connection is bad or because they are on a faraway server to play with friends - and they have the choice to either get used to it or despair.
What I definitely agree on is that people who actively want a higher ping in order to abuse it (I know a certain outfit does, they pretty much state that in their outfit browser description) are about as guilty as bugusers and glitch-users.

It can't be a competitive game because it doesn't have any matchmaking or balancing features. It would be like trying to organize the world cup of the world's football but with no limit to the amount of players that turn up per team and you mix professionals with the children's league.

The developers already tried to do MLG once, we are still dealing with the aftermath of the changes they made to things like Nanoweave and headshots. Not to mention how before that they decided to add the KD ratio as a readily visible item in the TAB screen which caused a major shift in how players pursued goals in the game.

The game should refocus it's attention to providing the grand MMOFPS experience that people play it for:

• Instead of KD that encourages players to hunt the weakest unit in the game with the cheapest weapons and tactics, players should be encouraged to try and get stats like breaking a chokepoint or destroying powerful units on the field.
• All objectives in the game should encourage players to create a fun experience for both themselves and others. At no point should a group be encouraged to capture a base by making it impossible for their enemies to defend.
• The devs should make sure that the large variety of items and upgrades in the game are all worthwhile. We have too many one-size-fits-all upgrades like Nanoweave or Hover Frame that are simply superior choices for 90% of the players most of the time.
• The king-of-the-hill experience has kept the game going for a long time, but the game could easily adopt a variety of capture modes that get randomly assigned to each individual base upon continent unlock. Such as various CTF modes and VIP modes.

The goal is that a high-skilled player will simply try to do more difficult tasks of high risk (with actual high risk!) and high reward while playing the game compared to lower skilled player, making them both valuable.

"I´d gladly take an lmg on my engineer out of fun though"



do NOT deny me my right to DAKKA

lol, I appreciate your dedication. A recommendation however would be to run an ar or carbine, which have faster ttk. LMGs are fun to use, but generally have slower tkk, which means they are less effective on the engineer without the use of headshots. SO it's not the best choice for 1v1 engagements. One scenario where they can be really good however is combined with the emp grenade.

I do not know how COD works and even the knowledge about PS2 internals is scanty. We are talking about things we do not really know so we toss in a lot of speculations...

Reaction time is player dependent so it the same in each game. Image draw time is both CPU (process the packet with the info and decide what to display) and GPU (display accordingly) dependent.

What is left is how to compute an hit.

You can compute the hit with a simplified hit-scan approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitscan) or bullet path (bullet and target speed, gravity), PS2 chooses the latter. The how is relatively clear. There where to compute the hit? You have three options: on the attacker PC (A), on the defender PC (B) or on the server (C). The server, being the central place where all the info are received and distributed looks like the ideal place but it does not scale, it is that simple. PS2 can have hundreds (thousands?) of players playing at the same time so the Attacker PC has been chosen (the defender PC is even more far away in time). So the Attacker on PC A will use the available information to figure out an hit and then inform the server "someone has been hit." and in turn the server will tell to the player on B "You have been hit!". And finally the player on B will see it on his/her screen, then react, then do something (unless he/she is dead already).

Just to have more fun: The hit algorithm is approximate because it has to be fast - so the player is seen as a collection of cubes called (conveniently) hit-boxes. If the bullet (a sphere) passes into an hit-box you have an hit. Alas, it paves the way to all sort of hacking. What if on my PC I find the location where the hit-boxes are stored and I maliciously make those hit-boxes as big as a barn? You guessed it, I will always hit my enemy, What if I make the bullet (a sphere) as big as a cannonball? That would work as well, but then that "bullet" would most likely hit something else before (a friend, an obstacle, the terrain, ...).

This guy figured it out four years ago (same year I discovered PS2 if I recall correctly), hear from 1:30 onwards...

Extremely good explanation. And I feel it explains why we've all landed shots that clearly shouldn't have been a hit even on our screen.

Hackers/exploiters will always find a way to cheat, whether it's through modified hitboxes or not. However, during the early stages of the game, it was discovered that hitbox files could be modified. Despite the insignificant amount of people using this to cheat, this sparked immense community outrage, and thankfully forced the devs to restrict those assets, and implement a constant validation of those files through battleeye. It's now quite impossible to cheat using modified hitbox files, as it will auto-detect and kick user in under 15 minutes (anyone is free to try).

He jumps to the wrong conclusion though.

For example he mentions that lower vehicle timers was a bad thing because it dumbs down the game. Yet lets say you have an equal 20 vs 20 vehicle battle of equal skill players. One side wins the vehicle battle, with the last bit of the vehicle battle being more and more vehicles ganging up on the remaining vehicles. That means the winners have several vehicles left.
The defenders are all on cooldown, those that died early will have to deal with simultaneously the several vehicles left and the vehicles that are respawning as they respawn. They will be at a continuous disadvantage. This was actually visible in the game: Prior to the change we had almost unstoppable vehicle zergs that only really petered out when they hit a warpgate or Biolab, after the change there was an actual chance they were stopped by the defenders since they had more opportunities to field enough vehicles.

The developers have catered to the "team"players since forever by always looking at ways to slowly nibble at the large fights that really attracted people. The Crown being the first base to get the treatment until it was much easier to converge on TI Alloys instead despite the fact that one side had to do a literal uphill battle which was almost impossible to win. Think about that, players preferred those fights so much they would rather fight an almost unwinnable battle that lasted forever than get stuck in the rest of the game.
The devs even did the MLG scene once which hit the game hard. They removed some of the no-skill items like the extremely large AOE explosions and the original thermals. They added the lattice which brought actual tactics to the game compared to the "zerg or ghost cap this way or that way until you reach a large base that might actually be defendable". It's not like all changes were bad, although if you ask people here a large portion will instantly start frothing at the mouth about how 'their' things were nerfed.


To come back to the point that he does agree with: Yes we need to change the objectives set for the players so they are encouraged to play the game as hard as possible rather than kill the weakest unit in the game with the least risk to yourself. The problem comes in it's execution: How can we create a common set of rules, objectives and goals for players to go for if we can't even agree on what a change will actually accomplish?

Nothing has killed PS2. If it did we would not be here talking about it. Sure, it got old and normally when a good game gets old it does not fade away but becomes a niche thing.

The thing about PS2 is it is still fairly unique in the game world and that helps keep it afloat I think. However it does suffer from a string of very poor development decisions (in my opinion).

The reality of all that is ,given it's age, it will never be super popular again and I doubt enough resources will ever be allotted to it to do anything but just keep it going so long as their are enough active subscriptions. But it can go on for a long time IF THEY WOULD JUST FIX STUFF AND STOP ADDING THINGS NO ONE ASKS FOR!

I know nothing of this Wrel person except for what he and his team produces for this game. Keeping that in mind I can only surmise he does not really have a skin in the game , cares nothing for the game itself and is simply adding flashy things no one asks for to try to make a name for himself as a developer or dev lead. This is all my opinion based on assumptions and conjecture.

If I had meant 'dodge' I would have said 'dodge'. I mean an infil decloaks in front of me to shoot from across a room as a Heavy and we pull the trigger at the same time. Turning it from "killed me while invisible", which would be a problem, to "miss the headshot and I kill you", which is not. Maybe I'm always facing the special needs Infils that take extra time to line up the headshot.

He's not lying. On Connery at least before the Soltech move this used to happen to me quite often. It hasn't happened for a while though.

This is the nonsense I normally see. A shot at the same exact time as the decloak.

See? Cheaters. And when i was playing on PS4 and i say that there are cheaters,i am classified as noob and troll. Maybe is not a good idea to return to PS2.

If you are referring to the pic of the decloak/shot that is probably not a cheater. It's probably just the lag in the game between someone doing something on their end and you seeing it on yours.