It's great to have huge battles with 1000's of players, but this game sacrifices accurate targeting and more precise shooting. I hear people say it's not a hitscan game, and I agree. The lag and hitbox issues leads to unexpected kill and death situations. It will be interesting, given that DBG is using this engine to build a Battle Royal game, to see how this plays out there
Sorry, but you're going to have to explain further. What hitbox issues? What lag issues? The game is client side so latency has no impact at all on you hitting where you aim. It's not a hitscan game because bullets have velocity and travel time. Hitscan weapons are "speed-of-light" travel time and those don't exist in this game. The gun play in PS2 is actually pretty damn tight... it was a design decision in response to the horrible gun play that Planetside 1 had. So, afraid I'm not following what you mean really. Are you talking about when you die behind a wall as a result of latency?
I'm referring to bullets appearing to hit the target, but not getting the hit markers. You say client side doesn't affect hitting where you aim, but I disagree. I see it all the time. Here is a video (albeit old) that shows what I experience It's an old video, but the issue still exists
I've actually never seen that happen outside of when the server's hamsters are dying off and the game lags for everyone. So could you perhaps show us some new footage then?
OK, I'm not into video capture or editing, but just for you Demigan I taught myself. I took this video today (It only took 15 minutes of gameplay to find BS encounters). Notice the NC dude steps on a prox mine first before he kills me. Notice I had FULL health and shield when he 2 shot killed me
Needs more footage I think. CQC setup Bandit with Laser sight vs NS-11 (stock?) high accuracy/low damage. Around the 0.05-06 mark the initial hit is right of him, the following across him, finishing somewhere left of him. Which means you have been punished for inaccuracy on a weapon that requires it, when he's planning to spray and pray on an NC profile weapon (167 @ 10 meters) from the get go and doesn't need the aim to the extent you do. Engagement for him is faster/easier at that distance. On top of that; He's got medic regen on, using what you would assume is a resto kit from his mine encounter on top of it (still running); and he's using the carapace implant. Which makes the guesswork on his medkit use even easier, because of playstyle it infers. His healing is going to shake off anything except headshot strings. You would have had far too much health to chomp through using the NS at that range in plain terms. Seems like there was some server punting as far as packets go there. But the servers run like garbage commonly now anyway. Consistency is the key as always (rapidly becoming my favourite word). Gather a string of encounters if possible, makes contrasting the types of encounter from a persons point of view much easier.
I see a common way to avoid the mine, IE activate it, step back before it blows so that the AOE is blocked by the stairs. Even if he was hit he was already almost out of the AOE so he would have received little damage. He's also a Medic with Carapace, so he's able to use his AOE heal to regenerate which you see him doing. When you step up and shoot him, you hit him 4 times. You can then hear 4 headshot dings on your own body which isn't a 2-shot and should be enough to kill you. This is suspicious especially since he's shooting from below but not a problem with the forgelight engine. What is a "problem" is that you see the latency system at work. You show your face above the stairwell and fire upon your enemy, what you don't see is that your enemy has opened fire as well until a bit later. The shots he fired in the time between the last latency package and the next one will come in one go and it feels like an almost instant death to you. In turn your enemy probably experienced the same, except he killed you first. The deathscreen in turn has had problems for years with the healthbar not being updated enough when you are dead. If you had seen his health on his screen he would likely have had much less health than the deathscreen showed.
When I come across a suspicious situation i'll just do a quick stat check before reporting to try and remove the chance of 'funny stuff happened related to the engine/latency'. High HSR - check Rapid kills with normal guns (ie. 1s apart including headshots) - check High SPM - check To counter - he's been around for a while and plays Medic using Carapace and Combat Medic implants which is a very (VERY) useful combo. Some might even say OP
Ok, let me analyze this. The pilot video - there seems to be standard hit detection throughout most of the fight, hitboxes on the ESFs are a little bit funny, but the guy seems to be getting normal hitmarkers, when shooting and properly aimed at the Mossy. The only suspicious part is toward the end of the video. The Mossy all of a sudden goes into a straight line shooting air and the guy shoots at him with no hitmarkers and then all of sudden he is dead. This makes me think that there was a connection issue on the side of the guy who made the video. When you lose connection to the server, other players go in straight lines and when you shhot them you get no hitmarkers. You can actually see in the video the Mossy jumps a little suddenly just before the guy gets the deathscreen. So this really looks like the guy got DCd for like a second and when he reconnected he was actually already dead. The video the OP made actually does not seem to be giving any suggestion of bad connection. The NC medic just seems to be (unfortunately for the OP) an insanely skilled player. The loadout he uses somewhat reflects this. Two maxed implants that are strongly in the meta and a carbine on medic, which comes from the ASP. I looked for this char, and according to fisu, this guy played for 107 days of net time in the last 2 years he started the char. That means an average of almost 7 hours a day. So the guy spends as much time playing PS2 as an ordinary person spends in work, so that is the basis for this situation. It is just unfortunate for the OP, but in PS2 you just sometimes run in this kind of guys, because of the no matchmaking. The mine placement on the top of the stairs is quite obvious . A mine going off does not mean a dead planetman automatically, there are lot of things a skilled player can do to avoid mines he knows about. As Demigan said, he probably saw the mine and gone back (thats why he is almost at the base of the stairs in the start of the engagement) to avoid the explosion. The ping problem with mines would be if the guy went over the mine and out of the blast radius in the same direction. But that would mean he would run twice the distance to avoid the blast as he has to when he approaches the mine and then retreats. Nevertheless, the mine gave OP a nice advantage in the engagement anyway, as he is now the one turning the corner and exploiting the ping. That gives the OP the first shot. And it actually registers. But when the NC medic gets to return the fire, it is obvious he is insanely skilled as he gets an instant triple heashot. Assuming he is using the Bandit carbine, it takes him 190 ms to take down an enemy with triple headshot, the rate of fire is quite high and it is almost impossible to recognize 2 shots from 3 for the defender. The engagement is very CQC so it is very possible such a skilled player can pull this out, espacially bcs the OP stops at the top of the stairs for a moment, giving the NC medic the time to aim. There might be one thing about the game engine that makes it a little bit "sloppy gunplay" in this engagement though, and that is in my opinion the movement of the hitboxes on sloped surfaces, which is quite unrealistic and quite unpredictable. This maybe gave the NC medic some edge in the engagement as when he moves on the stairs up and down, his hibox moves in multiple axes simultaneously, making it extremely difficult to target him. This is a bit similar to the problem of the crouch spam and ADAD spam, but solution of this problem is hard to imagine for a non-simulator FPS game.
''That means an average of almost 7 hours a day. So the guy spends as much time playing PS2 as an ordinary person spends in work.'' If true, that's just downright pathetic tbh.
In all honesty - if I was faced with exactly the same situation - i'd report him as suspicious as I do think the video suggests something isn't quite right, no flinch (despite no battle-hardened) and returning headshots like that despite aiming low ? So he's either insanely skilled - or - he's got assistance, hitbox, auto-shot or aimbot. Maybe he is that skilled but still worthwhile DBG investigating, which I would hope a /report prompts. At the end of the day - we've become so very very used to seeing this sort of thing, we just accept it.
You met a skilled player, and their TTK was expedited from your point of view due to clientside. However, none of your shots that hit him failed to register as a hit. He just killed you way faster than you did by using a gun with significantly higher DPS, and by getting headshots while you hit bodyshots. He also likely started shooting you before you started shooting him. (Again, there is a delay between when he starts shooting on his end, and when you see that he's shooting you on your end. But that is also true for the reverse, so a good player will use this fact to their advantage.)
There were no hit indicators, and the Reaver was dealing no damage to the Mossy when he should have. I've got a few infantry videos of this happening when servers are bad, but the damage always catches up, and usually we both die. That one was weird.
I am sorry, but I can see hit indicators and during the engagement the Mossy drops to half hp at one point, so it is clearly taking damage. I see hitmarks at 0:01, 0:05 to 0:08, then there is a first weird bit at 0:10 to 0:13 and at 0:16 to 0:18 is where the Mossy goes straight line as I wrote, which indicates the Reaver pilot got desynced. It is a bit weird the Mossy seems to be at full hp on the death screen, but before the Reaver explodes the Mossy flickers as if repaired, so it could have been regening the whole time the Reaver pilot was desynced. If it was the fault of the servers, they would be probably both dead as the damage dealt would sync for both at the same time. It seems though that only the Reaver pilot got disconnected and his damage packets therefore arrived at the server after he was already perceived dead and therefore got anulled. That is why lagswitchers always disconnect in a safe hiding spot, because if someone shot them while they are desynced, they would just get death screen, when they switch their connection on.
I haven't slowed this down yet, so I admit I may be wrong. While I see bullets hitting, I don't see a corresponding red X. I do see the Mossy's health drop, but it doesn't coincide with the Reaver's damage. It could be a delay, but I'm not convinced that damage is from the Reaver. For the record, I agree with everyone saying hit detection is great in this game, when the servers are running well anyway. My issue has always been with laggy players, lag switching, and poor servers, not this engine or client-side hit detection.
