Love this Render Distance!

Nothing says "large-scale battle" like not being able to see a pack of enemy-ESFs until they're a couple hundred meters away!

Yeah, that gets pretty old quick.

brb searching for a nice dogfight
15 lonely minutes later a lone distracted Mossie appears
sneak up and initiate attack
SUDDENLY 5 MOSSIES A DALTON LIB SUNDERER AA GUNS LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK
death

I don't understand how this game's selling point is massive battles, when you can barely see enemies that are standing right in front of you.

Problem is if they switch render to full , people with low-end pcs would have their rigs blowup especially with the shietty optimization going on thats the reason infantry fights are focused.
Sadly half the community(including me) run with low to mid PCs , so maybe expect a full render option when they fully fix the optimization problems and when people get better pcs.
Inb4 toaster jokes.

That's not the problem, those people can turn their render down to where they are hard limited now in order to compensate. The problem is for those of us who have good performance PCs who have tried maxing render distance in the graphics options, and even tried hard coding the ini for higher than normal render distances and yet still have the above problems with late renders, because they're hard coded and can't be avoided. Partially it's because render has been nerfed to inadvertently nerf spamming and reduce safe range farming. So we're introducing a whole host of new issues just to fix one issue that more or less isn't broken at this stage of the game anyway.

Wow so it's SOE that toned down render distance just for "farming" issues? that almost rendered Libs useless, gave tanks no way to retaliate to AV turrets and gave burstermaxes/AA/lockons dominance over ESFs.

Sounds like a trip over TR infested territory.

Player render is different to environment render. CPU load and even network load for more player rendering would be quite large.

I notice it most when im sniping and targets pop in and out of existence.

Also especially when your in an ESF with thermal, doing strafing runs. Its a case of:

Fly towards the ground.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Still Nothing.....
100m Altitude.
Swarms of dots appear.
Get off half a clip.
Too late, time to pull up.....

Ooo, a guy crouching still!!!!! 20m away! Perfect 1 hit kill chance!!!!
Aim, click. wtf? Gone?
Ooo, another!.. wtf gone too?

No.

They specifically said that they limit it on their end to keep the playing field equal and fair between high and low end PCs.

This practically ruins ESF air-to-ground gameplay in large battles because you don't see any targets until you're low enough to be hit by anything and everything, yet they can see you the moment you approach miles up in the air.

Just add an option to turn it down. People with good computers shouldn't be punished because some people don't.

Unless I'm mistaken, the render distance is not a consequence of low-end PCs, but because of SOE's servers. SOE doesn't care if your computer can handle 10 zillion players, the problem is that their server and ISP can't update the positions of 10 zillion players for you.

You could have the best hardware in the world but the problem is on the server end, not the client.

Yesterday I flew into a wall of flak that didnt appear until I was about 75m away from it - flying directly into it. They could obviously see me coming a mile away, but I didnt see them until I could reach out and poke on in the eye.

Add to this the sudden drop to 0 fps as 100 burster MAXs and HAs suddenly pop into existence, making any kind of evasive action all but impossible. Just hit the afterburners and hope you make it out the other end..

This is why I barely even bother attempting to attack ground targets now.

I think this is partly why long range infantry engagements don't happen much anymore. The players join a battle, the less stable the render range is, until you can only reliably engage at around 30 metres. And even then, since GU13 the hit detection has been hit-and-miss (sic).

But yeah, it's just fundamental flaw in ESF play imo. When you're at flight ceiling, patrolling with your wingman, looking for enemy aircraft to swoop down on... well, good luck, because all you'll see is tranquil, deserted Auraxis.

At least in games like Battlefield you know that you can see everyone else in the map. You don't have these "surprise" clusters of enemies.

At least PS2 playerbase hasn't figured out yet how to Grid-Fu (or maybe the engine doesn't allow it)

(Older) Eve Online players will know what I mean.

edit: speaking of Eve.. there was recently a 4000+ player battle in one system. The peak concurrent user record of any online game server is still with the game as well, at over 65k. Of course Eve deals with that many players (in one system) uniquely, by slowing time for them

Allowing people with high end PCs to have a substantially longer render distance is the ultimate pay2win. And people complained about implants?