Can someone help me understand

Scenario – I am a heavy and the other player is a heavy. I come around a corner behind him and start to unload into his back and the back of his head. About the first shot, he pops his shield and I continue to unload as he turns to fire (More the 30 feet away so he does not have a shotgun). I pop my shield and continue to fire (am not missing him). He turns POP I am dead and he still has part of his shield left. What am I missing here?

On a basic level, the health/shields displayed on your death screen is not always an accurate measure of what's actually there, I think this is a lag issue. For instance I once shot an infiltrator point blank in the face with my blackhand, but he killed me anyway. On the death screen, he was completely full. I sent him a tell asking him if my hit registered, and he said yes, he was almost dead.

Or could be hax. There's not much that's more frustrating than opening up full on someone oblivious only to have them turn and kill you as if nothing happened.

I've encountered people who seemed to look away from me or to the side when they opened fire on me.
Sometimes there seems to be almost a second of delay between an enemies action and the correct display on my screen.

And all while my tab screen talls me i have a "good" connection with ~80ms ping.

someone told me once that because this is a server side game. They said because I have a really good computer and very good ping I load to the server faster and they load slower, hence they see me before I see them. So they have half a clip out before I even see them. it boggles my noodle trying to figure it out. That sound of one ping hitting me from a heavy 40 feet way and dead drives me insane.

@Quinn I am pretty sure the game is Client side.

Over the past year, I have moved to a new server (thus better connection, lower ping) upgraded my processor and motherboard, installed an ssd, and purchased a 120 hz monitor. In addition I have gone to a much better connection which is now 50mb down, 3mb up. One thing I noticed that made a difference in what you describe is the new upload speed. For whatever reason, going from 1 mb up to 2 mb and then 3, I get fewer incidents of death from people I get the drop on.

It's client side.

It's a tradeoff. If you use server side detection, you will get hit in as close to real time as possible, as damage will only register once the server registers that the other player hit your actual location. But when shooting at other people, it will seem like rounds pass right through them sometimes if there is lag between the server and you.

The game actually uses client side detection. ie, if on your screen you hit the target, the server registers it as a hit regardless of the actual position of the other player on their client. This means that when shooting at other players, you always hit where you shoot, but when you get hit, you may be killed out of nowhere because there was lag in registering individual shots, or from around a corner because, due to lag, on the other player's screen you hadn't ducked behind it yet.

Well - the game uses client-side hit detection (so basically, your computer tells the server what's gone on - like what you've hit, where you have moved to etc).

If you've hit someone and they have a slow connection / computer, it may not register at their end for a while - meanwhile they've hit you with loads of bullets that you haven't seen or felt until your computer gets the message via the server, by which time you get lots of hits all together and you die.

It's also the reason why you can get hit when you've gone behind a wall - on your computer, you are nice and safe. On the other computer, you are still in the open and available to be shot - he shoots you - it comes back as a hit on your client, and you think WTF. Basically if he can see you - whether you can see him or not, he can hit you. This applies to render-range weapons too.

The client and server try to smooth everything out (called in general terms, netcode) - like assuming a vehicle is traveling in the same direction until it gets an update on its actual position. This is why vehicles / people can 'warp' around a bit / stutter / other peculiarities, very much exacerbated in big battles.

One final (possibly the biggest) issue with client-side processing is that it can be tampered with - ie. hacks, which can range from utterly blatant to very subtle.

None of this is unique to Planetside - and I personally think the developers have done an amazing job, but when we all have different PC specs and internet speeds, it means that we're going to have some strange stuff going on !

Zus2

Zus2, How do i increase my upload? I have a really good custom computer and cable modem and I am the only one using it.

So i should somehow slow my upload speed down? Would that balance things out a little?

It's all based on what plan you have with your ISP. More upload speed is always better. You don't want to be a lag wizard

Errr - well - no ! I believe that would be just adding to the problem rather than the solution. Some less scrupulous people did do things to slow it down (the in-built video capture was a bit of a resource hog, for example) but just take a deep breath and expect weird stuff occasionally.

I guess i am just going on about this because yesterday i went up against this Blueberry heavy. We went around an round for almost 1.5 hours. i never killed him one time. It one point there was 6 people chasing him around. he wouldn't just turn and kill one guy he killed 3 while they where all unloading on him. We never in all that time got more then 10% into his shield. he was doing it from up close and from 50+ feet away. At one point i saw 2 people unload on him from close while he was noob tubing the sundy and he switched to his main gun and killed both of them. Frustrating to say the least. I was starting to think there was no way he wasn't hacked.

Now THIS is an entirely different story.

Ahh OK - I thought it was a one-off, this is much more likely a hacker.

Report him - when in game type /report - if you do this immediately after he killed you, you can select his name from the next box (very useful if he has a stupid name like iiIIiiIiII) - you won't get any feedback but the more people report him, the more likely he is to be banned.

Not sure what it is -- but when there's like ping of 1000s of ms, and people begin to start running and floating in the air and warping around, if you shoot them, they die.

What was the characters name so we can purview his/her/it's stats.

Resist shield.

The most broken HA shield type.

With Bullets.

That's what I am going to guess that you are missing.

http://planethead.info/gameguide#h2-1-1-enemy-turns-around-and-kills-me