I noticed myself on about half a dozen occasions in the past week and it seems to get more frequent. I also had other people confirm they noticed this. Apparently lag switching is a thing again. You start firing at someone, they stop taking damage, momentarily disappear and then you are dead with the person behind you or headshotting you at their leasure. Example on how this works in another game, but we know it happens in PS2: This is poisoning the atmo. You can't trust anybody in the game anymore. Anybody who is genuinely good is getting hackusations. And whats the point in improving yourself if the game is rigged like this? Please find a way to fix it. It should be possible with modern data analysis tools. Why not use reports to start tracing people indicated closely, because where there is smoke there is fire?
Never seen it from this perspective, interesting video. From my personaly experience I would say I've never encoutnered anyone who was lagging consistently enough to say he was using a lag switch, but my sincere sympathies for those who end up on the receiving end of sh*t like that.
Client side hit detection will not allow people to avoid damage and get kills on you for free. If they drop the hammer on inbound packets that does nothing for the hits being registered on the attacking client or server. At best they can avoid being notified of damage to keep outputting their own and generate an artificial "Trade" where you both die. Mind you, they'll die some seconds after the battle when they turn the incoming traffic back on. I think what they'll do more often is throttle the outbound traffic but leave inbound alone. They get a nice clean view of you traveling on the screen with minimal clientside. On your screen it's clientside hell. They pop around a corner kill you and walk away before you feel the first shot hit. But yeah, shenanigans like this are totally detectable if you implement your netcode right. Realtime media does this all the time. It's UDP so you can't see round trip times and such but some encapsulated protocol like RTP will have an RTCP "telemetry" channel. With such telemetry it's easily noticeable if the inbound and outbound legs of the round trip differ. And by easy I mean...don't bother to generate a report for admins, just have the code handle the player kick right then and there automatically. But alas... the devs we have now didn't write this crap from the ground up and are unlikely to be able to pull this off.
If anyone wants to see a lagswitch in action from the receiving end on PS2, try this (towards the end - 1:10ish): This guy is pretty stupid too - tends to kill multiple people within the same lag period - which shows up blatantly on the killboard (multiple people killed in 0s). So he was reported a few months ago and yet is still doing the same thing judging by his last session earlier this month. Yet - another cheater from last night was removed (deleted) in 10 minutes which is the fastest i've seen for a while (assume he was using something easier to detect). As developers get better at detecting coded cheats, the good old lagswitch comes to the fore.
In the same way you moreoften die behind cover if you have high ping yourself. Bullets are registered on the client that shoots them. They hit you, data gets sent to the server, data gets processed by server, data gets sent to you. The slower any of those steps is, the later the bullets actually hit you on your screen.# In this case, the sniper might have shot when the guy in the video last peeked the door. (Of course it could have other reasons, I'm not CSI Scarfield Reliquary.) The sad part is, the game can add timestamps to bullets and can detect if they're off. But it doesn't, or if, it does with a lot of leeway (talking about multiple seconds here). I assume the leeway is generous, since otherwise some people from places with bad internet infrastructure or just being far away (Australia, Russia, cross continent players, ...) wouldn't be able to play. I'm pretty certain there are people abusing the system tho. Why are high ping players a problem? Reaction time. If they shoot me, their data takes 300ms+ to reach the server, then another 20-30ms inside the server, then another 20-40ms to reach me. If a weapon has less TTK than the combined latency, it is impossible to react. If someone with a high ping gets the drop, they have a significantly easier time to kill their target, because there won't be any evasive reaction whatsoever. It's already noticeable to me when playing on the NA servers instead of EU, where I'm the one with 200ms ping. However, high ping adds the same disadvantage to the player. If they're the target, they have less or no time to react either. High ping benefits agressive, fast playstyles. Not going into further details, but the clientside stuff and generally "having a bad connection" is way easier to exploit than most people think.
Yes at first it just looks like a straight 'cheat' but on examining his killboard at the time, he had a whole bunch of people he killed in 0 seconds - which basically meant - he started the switch (effectively disconnected), killed lots of people, then reconnected - everyone he shot while disconnected suddenly died thinking WTF no matter where they are. Killing multiple people within 0s using a normal gun is a classic signature of a lagswitch. Of course - the not-so-stupid folks ensure they only ever kill 1 within the lag period. Same for ESF - you can disconnect - kill ESF - have a swig of beer or two, reconnect and he would instantly die wherever he had managed to fly to. PS2 used to be incredibly lenient with the disconnect / reconnect period before a kick - something like 3 minutes. Same method also used to fly under the map.
In other shooters if you lose connection or try to lagswitch you either get timed out of the server entirely or your actions (including damage) won't register until connection is re-established. Planetside should have something similar.
