[Suggestion] Couple of things

There are a few really bad things in the game right now that would be easy to fix:

A) Spamming crouch
The animation for the player who is doing it takes time, while the animation is instantaneous for the opponent. This creates the problem where a lot of people spam crouch during fights. This is an exploit. Suggestion: make crouch and getting up at least 0.75s. This will make it a much more tactical tool. I would love to see prone as well, but ...

B) Fix cloaker
Cloakers have nothing to do but ***** easy kills. And boy are they given a free reign in this game. It's super easy to get a 10:1 K/D just running around with an instagib knife. They are too numerous, too strong and too annoying. The problem is that they have no role. Suggestion: increase visibility for moving cloakers again, especially when walking (not crouching) and sprinting. Increase the range and the highlighting power of blacklight attachments or bring back the blacklight implant as it was in PS1. Then give cloakers the ability to hack enemy vehicles ...

C) Ambusher LA
LA is totally weird to start with, but being able to get up on roofs etc. is not a problem. The main problem is Ambusher, which paired with the weakness of the netcode to handle fast moving objects creates a really annoying situation. Suggestion: Remove the Ambusher from the game. Period.

A: a simpler solution would be to tie it to the jump button. To stop bunny-hopping from becoming mainstream in fights the devs introduced a system that slows you down if you keep jumping. Adding the same to crouch would stop crouch-spam.

B: we should move away from KD instead. If KD isn't deemed as important but completing goals and objectives is then cloak stops being a problem.

C: I've never ever seen an ambusher jet being used in a way that was blatantly superior to the other jumpjets. Any angle that takes the ambusher closer to his target means that even if his hitbox is messed up, the bullets will still pass through the hitbox and hit. At best it could be used to escape by going perpendicular to the target, which in the long run isn't a very useful tactic.

It's not about having a K/D statistic, it's about constantly getting killed with nearly no means to fight back. The counters are useless and it's ridicolously easy for infiltrators to keep a whole squad busy at a base and killing them over and over.

Just had that today (in the last game I ever played) - 2 Infiltrators with knives had the upper hand of 12 people equipped with counter meassures

I think that speaks more volumes about the 12 people than the Infiltrators.

But again that is exactly why we need to move away from KD. It means those Infiltrators will be busy with other stuff than finding a place to farm knife kills and it means that your death doesnt mean as much to you, only what you achieved with it.

This has been done to death. Spamming crouch is counterproductive. If your head displaces faster than the refire rate of my weapon, you may as well not be moving at all, because on my end I shot you in the face. Due to the Clientside nature of this game, this means you've just become the Marvin to my Vincent. Congratulations.

They could definitely make the animation smoother, but from a gameplay standpoint nothing would change. Crouch absolutely has tactical utility, but spamming isn't it.

If it's not about K/D, I wouldn't reference it in your OP. Moving infils are visible from ~15-20m which is plenty to prevent power knife shenanigans.
Darklight does need fixing though, I will agree.

I'll say with confidence that the problem in that situation did not lie with the Infiltrators.

It has been done to death, and the question is why people are even trying to defend it? Veterans are using this, we have video's of people using this combined with popping medkits to increase their survival. It is effective, it is a problem.

The very nature of the latency system is the problem. Your head might displace so fast on your screen, but not on theirs. They get packets at semi-regular intervals and their pc has to interpolate inbetween the packets what your character is doing. Since you are crouched for a fraction of the actual time you are moving it means that when a new packet arrives the pc needs to suddenly say "hold on, he's a bit more to the left/right than predicted".

This makes shooting a crouch-spammer immensely difficult. Their character moves at a constantly varying speed, at varying stances and jinx around it's position whenever they managed to get the interpolation system to send them much farther in one direction. Since your packets likely contain simultaneously a command for crouching and standing up again, the interpolation will make the character crouch and stand up while retaining maximum strafing speed to increase the chance your character will jinx around. On top of all that the crouch animation and what it does to your hitbox takes longer for anyone watching.

But hey, we can keep on doing the "naaaah it barely makes a difference because on MY screen I'm crouched for a fraction of your refire rate, right?".

Actually the game client (just like a VOIP call using RTP) will steam very small packets of updates constantly and with only a very small delay between them.

I say this just to be specific as it does not at all invalidate your point. That whole end to end latency deal is a real thing without a doubt. This of course causes most of the mistimed funky stuff we see I believe. And i think it is also the reason why whomever gets the drop almost always wins.

In normal games that is the case. But that system has an exponential increase in traffic as player counts rise, which is why most games will not go passed the 64 player mark. PS2's latency system is a miracle in itself that Sony should pat themselves on the back for with all the infantry, vehicles and aircraft that can fight simultaneously on one continent or even a single base.

The drawback is a larger time difference in packets, hence calling it the latency system.

Dipping once or twice and popping a medkit != becoming a human jackhammer. One is effective, one is not. The animation should be fixed so the displacement is not instantaneous and I said as much above:

I'm just making a point to clear up a common misconception. Spamming crouch to duck headshots is like waving your hand back and forth in front of a machine gun expecting not to get shot: the time spent out of danger is statistically irrelevant.

This is extremely disingenuous. Clientside game is Clientside, ergo what happens on my end is actually important. If the guy who's head I'm shooting is crouching so quickly his hitbox barely moves for me then his crouching isn't helping him at all.

A stalker is weak and has no primaries. They tend to focus on stragglers, lone wolves or inexperienced players (the ones not moving very much). The counters are easy and well known:

1. move always
2 don't wander alone

Kills, Deaths and Assists should disappear from Statistics and so any moronic directive based on killing. Just find other ways to get a BettleJuice.

It is not so straightforward. I program my wonderful programmable mouse to randomly strafe left and right for, say, 100ms and I throw on top a random 50 ms bobbing up and down flip-flop style.

Now you try to hit me. You see me moving, so you react and correct your aim. You need, say, 200ms to do that? Great by that time I am elsewhere, you re-aim I move again meanwhile. Your need more time to adapt to my movement pattern than my mouse to perform it.

All the time, I can focus on firing at you while I have my "auto-move" dance in progress.

A) Spamming crouch
Isn't a problem. Just aim for a chest.

B) Fix cloaker
Isn't a problem. Just move and be aware.

C) Ambusher LA
Isn't a problem. But funniest loadout in a whole game. Ambusher LA flight is almost non controllable, so you can easily predict its trajectory and the place where enemy lands.

Replace kills with hours. For example get 300hrs playing HA to get the directive weapon.

At close range you usually aim to the head. That's the problem. You can easily recognize someone who is crouching on purpose (sometimes it helps, sometimes not, in my experience the closer the range the more it helps) and someone who has some kind of mechanical crouch-spamming because he is moving like a deranged chicken during a duel.

All vets will tell you there is 0 purpose to crouch spamming. It is more detrimental than effective, and has been explained countless times. What is effective is a random movement (a crouch, a strafe) for 0.5-1s that forces the person to react (re-adjust their aim). You don't need to react to crouch-spamming, it simply doesn't give you the time to do so anyways. I always aim for the head, however up close, maybe around the 5m range, I switch to hipfire so I can react faster to any movements. I don't get mad at people for not standing still to eat my shots, because that's kinda boring and gameplay I'd expect from VR training. YOu're allowed to move in the game, and using well timed randomized movements in combination with medkits to increase your survival is intended gameplay. Just because you have trouble doing so does not make it a bad thing. Watch tutorials/train with skilled players and learn how to do it and how to counter.

Using a macro isn't very helpful as well. It makes you predictable, which defeats the purpose of using random movements to throw off aim. It also doesn't give you the opportunity to adjust to players that may have faster/slower reaction times.

Oh yeah definitely those are so stupid stats to have in a FIRST PERSON SHOOTER. Killing things? What were the devs thinking?!??!?!


Seriously though I don't get how people even think that's a logical think to say. It's a shooting/war game. The whole point of the game is to kill stuff, and capture bases. Having most directives based around that makes the most sense. People would play minecraft if they didn't wanna shoot/be shot at. People can aurax weapons in 6 hours. I do it typically in 10-12 now that pop is so low and I'm chilling. We'll use that. That's 50 hours for a new weapon that's literally a worse version that the default a no one's forcing you to get.

Why is the new weapon even important if we don't play for kills or whatever.

Nah this is just silly. So far the directives about killing are the quickest ones and those that make the most sense to complete. 1200 AA ribbons or whatever is what I would consider a stupid directive.

Idk dude unless you want to rework the game so everyone's stuck in sanctuary mode I'm not quite sure where you're getting at, and how you even think it makes sense.

You're missing the point a little, here. Forgetting for a minute that macros are specifically disallowed, in your example the strafe has more of an effect on aim than the ducking does.
Ducking once every 50ms is extremely counterproductive, not only is your head spending the majority of its time at your opponent's original point of aim, the displacement is happening so fast that you won't even get a meaningful reaction from them.
The point of ducking in a firefight is to throw off someone's aim and gain a precious fraction of a second advantage, something that cannot happen if your actions are taking place several times faster than they could possibly react. You get more mileage out of one or two well-timed ducks than a pogo-stick.

TLDR: There are players on Connery I would much less rather face than your macro, for all the stated reasons above.

You don't seem to understand the full situation.

We aren't talking about people just standing still and hitting Crouch all the time. They move from side to side. So let's take your hand in front of a machine gun analogy and expand on it:

• If you just wave your hand in front of the machine gun, 2/3rd of the time it's on the left or right side of the stream and won't get it. In a game where you can take multiple hits this is very important.
• A smart machine gunner will adjust his aim for this waving hand, increasing his amount of hits.
• Now we add ducking into the mix. Sometimes the target will be harder to hit as he represents a smaller target.
• Now we add the all-important bit: Latency.
  • Any action you take will be shown delayed on your enemy screen.
  • The actions you take will be send intermittently to your enemy. Your enemy's PC will have to interpolate what is happening based on what actions were taken last. Simultaneously the PC will try to show each action even if they were delayed.
  • The position of a player is an exception. If the coordinates of the player are updated you will not see them move to the new location, instead they'll be teleported to that location. In normal play the interpolation means the difference is so small that you don't notice it. With ADAD+crouch spam this is dislocated.

And here is where the problem lies. Actions taken like crouch-spam will be shown. But since the latest package probably said the player was moving left or right while standing the interpolation system will make him move as if he was standing, even though on your screen you see the player duck and stand up a few times.
That means that the player on the clientside will be firing at a target that can duck randomly, move side-to-side much farther than in reality and then the game realizes at the next package that the player was somewhere else and teleports him to the "right" location, only to interpolate the wrong thing again.
The thing you are completely missing is that clientside hit detection might be a thing, this is 100% a problem with the latency system and not the clientside hit detection. You aren't waving your hand across a machine gun stream, you are waving your hand, teleporting it around and opening+closing it to make it more difficult to hit.

As discussed to death in another thread. This one just doesn't bug me. If you did decide to simply tie a duck to the same hidden stamina bar that jump is tied to it may be a solution though. Wouldn't really impact the players who have developed ducking as a skill, but would interfere with any one like using a macro or something.

Improve the cloak. Make it last longer, burn less when moving.

BUT put it on a newly added weapon slot.

Infiltrators can still do everything they did before but decloak on fire will become a bigger challenge.

Again, not one that bugs me but I get where you come from. In a closer range high deflection shot they are hard to hit netcode or not. Low deflection shots (jetting right at you) are still maneagable with the crappy netcode. So most of the time the netcode limitations do not actually change the outcome of the engagement.

Ambusher gets the first shot after the end of the jump, but you get enough notification that it's coming that he's going to be firing at a moving jinking target that's a moment from firing back.

Some people want that toy in the sandbox and I don't thing it's bad enough to take away others fun.

Seems like that the developers have acknowledged the problem and have some idea's how it could be solved: