I've been waiting 20 years for gme devs to do something about the zig-zag lag exploitinga

Ever since I first saw it in 2001 playing WWIIONLINE I was rolling my eyes at the lameness of it all. You know Quake 1 CTF didn't have this problem in circa 1997, cause we were getting like 15 ping on dial up modems. Well we aren't getting 15 ping with dial up modems anymore.

I mean how hard would it be to slow movement speed down, or drain stamina, every time you rapidly changed directions while sprinting.

If (change direction while sprinting) > (90 degrees per second)
then (drain muh stamina) or (slow movement speed like jumping repeatedly already does)

Halleilujah! Problem solved. WOOoooooooOoooooooOOooOOoooOOooo.

I don't know what's more annoying:

1) the headache you get when zig-zag lag exploiting yourself
2) trying to shoot the enemy while friendlies are zig-zag lag exploiting in front of you, so you end up shooting friendlies in the back more than the enemy
3) or trying to shoot the enemy zig-zag lag exploiting

Total cancer. 20 years. No more 15 ping dial up modems. 20 years? 22 YEARS! TWENTY TWO YEARS!

It's not an exploit and I don't get this headache that you talk about.

It definitley is an exploit and should be fixed if it occours in a game.
And most games indeed do something about it. Only PS2 tries to have outdated gunplay from a 30 year old arena shooter in a large scale shooter.

That's too complicated.

IMO the devs should start off small.... First make it so strafing (a,d) is locked while in sprint, so you can't strafe while sprinting and then inspect this annoying mechanic to see what can be done further.... Possibly if it is still terrible, slowing acceleration into full sprint speed may be another step that'll help here on top of the locked strafing of course. And I do believe this would be enough to solve this one issue, out of hundred others lol.

Other solutions:
Guns loose way more accuracy when fired while moving.
Cone of fire increases for a short time after changing direction
Meaningful surpression mechanics
Generally less movement speed

Explain how it's an exploit? It's just movement.

OMG you don't even know how to shuffle Go see the OP. He gets the mechanic.

When this is done you'll be the only person ever to get better at the game by complaining on the forums.

I play with a controller and mouse. It's a little goofy but works great for me. There is already a movement penalty in place while ADS. Hip fire also has a penalty for movement and jump with COF expansion. Not aware of it being an exploit. That type of erratic movement I use on a daily basis while moving in open areas while those OP Snipers try to pick me off. A little zig here a little zag there. Also, as JibbaJabba commented it's simply a movement mechanic. I use sprint, jump, and straff in combination even in CQC to create space or get in close to knife. Works great with a choked shotty as primary as the COF and Bloom are not detrimental at such close proximity. But.... that's just me.

It's too late to completely change mechanics like this, and I don't think it's even a good idea in the first place.

However, they could tighten up the animation a little like they did with the crouching. Less jank would be nice.

because it heavily depends on a player doing more movement than they should be due to the server latency, because your PC only interpolates where other players should be for most of the time with updates of the exact location inbetween.
Normaly this should be nearly unnoticable, but becomes a problem when the direction is changed extremly frequently, thus becoming an exploit.

For once I have to agree with OP.

All games use a system that extrapolates the movement of other players in between the time it takes for another packet arrives. “The last movement input was forwards while strafing left, I’ll just depict the player as if he keeps moving in that direction until the next packet”.
Then when the next packet arrives the actual position and direction are updated. This happens so fast in games its almost unnoticeable, unless there is packetloss due to lag and people start rubberbanding. Rubberbanding is the result of the extrapolation being so far off that your PC has to place the opponent at a completely different position.

Then in comes crashing PS2’s latency system. It increases the gap between packets so it can send one big packet and distribute that among all players in the vicinity, circumventing an exponential data problem with each player in range. This is what lets PS2 have so many players in the game where other games pretend that 32 players in a single match is huuuuuge. But this can be exploited: if you rapidly strafe left/right you barely move from your position, but on enemy PC’s the extrapolation shows the player first moving far more left and right than they actually move. This creates a deliberate rubberbanding effect where the player doing the ADAD dance keeps teleporting tiny bits. With PS2’s clientside hit detection that means you are now firing at a target that is doing micro-teleports around one position based on the current variable server latency. That makes for a harder target and you can’t ever predict properly how much the opponent will teleport or even which direction he happened to be going in when the last packet was send.

The solutions given are pretty easy to implement. We already have a system that punishes too much jumping with lowered movement speed. Apply the same to the ADAD and C combinations and you are set to eliminate this problem. Any normal player will never really be affected since you need to deliberately try to abuse this before it kicks in so any regular player making just a few quick movement changes wont even notice.

Other options will affect all players but can be just as effective. A slightly higher acceleration/decelleration phase to movement for example like Sidewinder does I think. It makes the extrapolation easier for the PC since a tiny acceleration/decelleration phase is now included in the extrapolation and it makes it harder for the opponent to use it effectively.

That said, saying “but game X had Y” is dumb. Especially since the early games like Quake he mentions used peer-to-peer communications which had its own problems so we switched. If game X has a fully destructible environment and functional AI to navigate and fight in it, it doesn’t mean we can build a full RTS game using both the FPS AI mechanics and the fully destructible environments.

If just by some simple movements the player performing movement, described as " Zig Zag" from the Client side, introduces microbursts of latency into the server to allow for these mini teleports then we have a serious problem. There has to be an issue on the OP's side with ping/latency creating lag spikes giving the impression of some type of mini teleport. Where do they live? What is their ping/latency? Do they have packet loss? Are they experiencing JITTER in any way to allow for the introduction of the smallest amount of lag of their client? Are they hard wired or using wifi? Do they have Fiber, Cable, or DSL? So many questions to ask with nothing from the OP about any of the metrics from his client.

He did mention shooting at what he thought was an enemy only to end up shooting a friendly in the back. Sounds to me like they have enhanced ping/latency issues on their side. Might be a router issue or hell even some wicking at the stop creating data degradation. I would recommend a thorough examination of their entire network before getting on the forums and creating a thread making these types of unfounded and unsubstantiated claims of players EXPLOITING. That's not a term that should be used lightly in the gaming community. Has far too many negative connotations and in my opinion very unfortunate for the OP to introduce in this venue.

You misunderstand.

This happens to EVERYONE. This is baked into the code of the game. Just look at two players using a jump pad and you’ll see similar rubberbanding despite no direction changes. This isn’t something you can blame on their setup or hardware. This is the very system build from the ground up to work like this to give us the MMO fights rather than the 32 or 64 player sized fights most games limit at.

So a player doing an ADAD dance just figures “hey people don’t hit me as much, I’ll keep doing it”. While in reality they are actively exploiting a rubberbanding problem that will always be there. That is not an unfounded or unsubstantiated claim, that is just the truth. If you actually pay attention or use video capture you can see this is the case, especially during high server latency.

The solution is to simply limit those quick changes if you continue to use them in a short amount of time.

I do not agree with your assessment. As I said we are limited in what we can troubleshoot simply due to the lack of data provided by the OP. I'd like to see a screen shot of their in-game ping along with system information and some video footage. Also, a ping fluctuation, known as jitter, can induce the same visual delays the OP is experiencing. And yes system settings can create some lag as well if you are trying to play at a high/ultra resolution on a mid-range GPU/CPU versus playing at a medium resolution on a higher tier GPU/CPU. You will always get better FPS in the latter unless you have a solid ping and higher tiered CPU/GPU that can handle the additional load. However, I find the info you presented interesting.

I'll run some tests of my own with a couple of my squad mates this week and see if I can duplicate or recreate these effects. Just for transparency I have never experienced the issue posted about by the OP. Then again maybe I wasn't looking for it and just passed it off as a glitch.

Not saying you aren't correct. My gut tells me the OP has another set of issues that is actively creating lag in their client giving the allusion that there is some type of net code problem.

What's zig zag movement? As a knife main I haven't seen infantry lagging? huh? & obviously as a knifer I have to run near to them.

The only time I've seen lag used as a exploit, is chinese Ant's harvesting from far.

Latency exploiting is also peaking out from behind cover and firing, and then doing a 180 and sprinting back behind cover again; and what it looks like to a 3rd person is someone acquiring a target and firing in less than a quarter of a second making reaction impossible. Again this would be fixed if you were slowed down by changing angular direction so quickly while sprinting, which I'd love to see you guys in full combat gear try in real life. Try sprinting and then changing directions by 180 degrees every second while trying to maintain a sprint, even the world's fastest sprinter wouldn't be able to do that.

Wait what, lag exploit is how you mine from a mile away? I've always wondered how these cheaters were able to mine cortium while driving away from it and continue to mine the cortium even at like 500 meters away.

This is like disagreeing that Excell is for data sheets and limited processing. It doesn’t matter that you disagree, its literally what it was coded for.

You meant Excel correct? Got no idea what Excell is. In any event I'm done with this thread. No need trying to have a conversation when you choose not to offer any verifiable metrics for your side. The days of I'm right and you're wrong are over without some data to back up your claim. Doesn't really matter to me one way or the other. Not my thread.

I did spend about 2 hours on Sunday with 14 other players trying to experience the issues as described by the OP. I never did. Nor could they on their end. I put the data I collected into a nice little presentation. I'm still working on the video portion. I'll post everything this Sunday. At least I can say I provided the information I said I would and followed through. At this point I see no further need for discussion with you Demigan. I won't reply to any other postings in this thread other than what I submit on Sunday. I'll let my presentation stand for itself as well as the data I collected with some additional system metrics from all players involved as well as internet speed/ping/latency and game settings.