I'm starting to see more and more players use Lag switches or upload manipulators in ESF and using Doltons each day, is it bannable or do we just ignore it and rage about lag? Personally I'm getting sick of it, it literally makes you stop moving on their client and they warp on your's when it catches up, making it impossible to kill them. You can tell when a ESF Pilot uses a Lag Switch, when he starts shooting or picks his target, he'll stop moving in mid air for a second and then zoom off/warp, normally after his victim has been insta killed after the catch up. Surely there are triggers in place to catch people who repeatedly keep losing connection? No offence if you're legitimately laggy, but if you haven't got a stable connection, I don't want you ruining my day because of your inconsiderate connection.. I remember the good old days of the first few F2P games, like Rakion.. if you didn't have a good connection the game was like NOPE! and that was the end of that..
You're sitting next to these people, and watching them do this, and you're not stopping them? Must be one terrible LAN party.
I've been flying a lot lately and have seen what you are talking about but they tend to be players who stats show they aren't really getting anything out of it. There are legit reasons they are popping around like that which they can't control. Sometimes their connection just takes a dump and I think it's more noticeable with fast moving objects. If your connection quality drops, they can look screwy too. If the same player is doing it at just the right time all the time then you have something. But I've got videos of someone doing that as I chased them and I don't think they were doing it on purpose. As well as video of TWC giving me issues and you can see it's not giving me any benefit and only hurting. I imagine they are tracking this type of thing since they can show connection quality and will eventually boot those who are actually getting an advantage around that time. I've seen a few lag wizards disappear from the game.
I think I was accused once of "warping all over the place". I didn't even know what to tell that guy.
Happens when ever someone in the house starts downloading stuff from steam. Steam is notorious for sucking every bit of bandwidth when downloading games. As for people who do it intentionally I don't see how you could possibly benefit from it. Its not like everyone is standing still for you to shoot at. Everyone else is warping and rubber banding all over the place as well.
I want to drop a video to give an example of what a Lag switch is, and what it looks like to the other player, but I don't want to educate people to new ways of cheating and those willing to do any thing for a cheap kill for KD.. Lag Switches were a very common problem in PlanetSide 1 since it was all Client side hit registration. Basically, the guy with the switch will stop moving, the guy he's shooting will instantly die, and his player model will warp or look like a speed hack to his real location on his client. It's one of those things, that no matter how good you are, or if you're in a position he shouldn't be able continue to hit you, you'll feels a constant stream of hit registration. I get it a lot when I'm flying a ESF, I'll be flying a long then suddenly I'll take a load of damage even though I've maneuvered around and get it's 100% hits on me. That's because the moment before attack, the other Pilot has hit his Lag switch, which stops you from moving on his screen for a good couple of seconds and him from to other people for a split second.
You realize that when they are frozen in place like that, You can still damage them right? I kill tons of ESF's that way when ever they start lagging out. All damage is done clientside, So if you hit them in your client, You hit them no matter what (So long as you hit them before their client says they killed you).
I don't know if it is possible to detect a lagswitch, but for a start they should simply kick people from the game whenever their latency reaches a certain treshold.
I doubt anyone has ever been banned for it, in a way understandably because PS2 server performance has always been so patchy as to make it effectively impossible to do so. ESF-wise I imagine it makes ground farming pretty easy, as they should get a kill pretty much every time.
Might this be related to esfs standing still and shooting with their noseguns at weird angles (like the spur) and hitting it all? That's not always true...some people just expect how you will dodge and lead apropriately (very rare). Or they might have an airhammer. Also some people that use rotary canons can kill you before you know what hit you if they and you have a ping of roughly 200-300 (which is actually common when a lot is going on).
I know personally, I've been having lag issues with my connection, getting good ping then jumping to 1-3k for 3s. I don't know if its my end or server end, but some other people said they were having connection issues as well. Does it stop me from playing the game though? No, I reaaaalllyy like this game.
They probably should honestly, say after so many times in a day though lets say 3. I know personally, I get ping spikes because Im using my colleges internet and that, well really, everyone is on it.
