Why no one addressed the elephant in the room

[Gunz_Zbestest]

There is something to be said for the hit detection. My bioblaster is a cone attack but if I hit someone as they use a jump back, it seems to take my 'cone attack' away. Like it's not hitting the ground but attacking the player you target. This is anecdotal evidence by the way.

[Valence]

There is something to be said for the hit detection. My bioblaster is a cone attack but if I hit someone as they use a jump back, it seems to take my 'cone attack' away. Like it's not hitting the ground but attacking the player you target. This is anecdotal evidence by the way.

It's very visible and bizarre with RDM's resolution especially, which acts like an aiming cannon when pointed at a target closeby that has a lot of radial velocity. You think you're safe from it until it rotates following whoever it was aimed at and you eat it right in the face.

[Commander_Justitia]

There is something to be said for the hit detection. My bioblaster is a cone attack but if I hit someone as they use a jump back, it seems to take my 'cone attack' away. Like it's not hitting the ground but attacking the player you target. This is anecdotal evidence by the way.

They have trouble with z-axis and aoe skills. E.g. if there is a player above you. The aoe skill might hit him, but not the players around him. It used to work both ways though, in the past e.g. mch had flamethrower, if he used it above you, you were still hit even through walls below it. Famous example was Astrologos middle CE generator that people fought for, and under it, the CE were respawning as items to be picked up, those who picked it up got hit out of nowhere with flamethrower dots. I think they fixed that - but, we have a whole range of new skills now performing weirdly.
You can also wonder why on CloudNine map, you become invulnerable once you get send up flying. Or why CC maps in general offer very limited z-Axis potential. And why they still removed the RivalWings and Frontline maps with the most z-axis heights to this day.
Anyway I think it affects line and cone aoe the most. Pointblank Aoe seem less an issue.

Another weird thing, that has existed since a very long time, is that you can backflip, teleport or dash from a very high point down to ground level - while not taking any fall damage. This makes jobs with these abilities a lot stronger. Also the way these teleports work - you can aim against a wall diagonally, it will still try to move you behind the wall if the edge of it is close. Basically instantly putting you behind a wall, breaking line of sight if you aim it right. This is all because skills don't have to be placed on the ground, that would give you the error message that the destination is not in visible range, but are performed without that check anyway automatically. Another example of making game easier to play, that backfires and making it more seemingly glitchy - players have to figure out the bottlenecks of the engine to perform well - instead of just focusing on their skills and strategy. An awful way to improve.

[Valence]

Honestly, to me the hit detection changes have actually been fairly beneficial and allowed me to do things I couldn't do otherwise, like moving AOEs before they go off so they snapshot better. I also do not have any issues with the Purify reaction time because it is nigh-instant for me, same for Guard - I guarded vs Primal Rend about 0.1s before impact the other day.

I am not discrediting the experience here, but there is clearly a factor they completely ignored when designing these changes - LATENCY.

For context I play at 10ms (10 Ping) as I live in Germany connecting to a german datacenter (Light + Chaos) through a VPN to ensure I get a direct connection with basically no hiccups. I literally do not have "any" issues regarding hitreg and anytime I miss, it's actually my fault.

Inversely, this means that this netcode is working, but is absolutely brutal at latency exceeding 50-70ms. Things like stuns hitting after pressing Guard making Guard go on cooldown, Resilience not protecting against follow-up CC in time, AOEs not landing (particularly position based AOEs like Holy Sheltron bomb, Impalement, Bioblaster, etc.) are MAJORLY affected by latency, as you are actually no longer snapshotting at a single point in time where you know the player is for sure, but you have to track them where they actually "might be".

It will favour you at low latency, it will be basically soft-gambling at high latency. Given North America Datacenter location(s) generally being unable to favour the entire region at once and JP being a relatively small region (geographically), it makes sense they did not consider high latency when designing the netcode changes.


"Technically" how it works is just different from what we are used to and can be learned, but our network infrastructure world wide does not allow for low latency gaming worldwide, let alone regionwide. As long as this is a factor, this will remain a problem, therefore this netcode without adjustments is flawed.

I play at 20-30ms latency, no real issues with freezes or delays unless an instance is actually fucked, and while guard works fine and fast, recup and purify take ages to take effect. And to top it off they're affected by the huge animation delays that are completely unreasonable comparatively to what they used to be. Even Guard, while responsive, sometimes just doesn't want to activate, whether due to stupid crazy animation delays from other skills or just reseting for some reason. It's always been a problem though, but a lot of things feel broken or inconsistent right now to me.

I have a lot less issues with delays on attacks, but on defense, it's just been a shit sandwich, and it is also tied to how cc snapshots and resolves at the same time as attacks now on top of it. Nothing feels responsive at all, it feels like playing from the moon. Ironically it feels a lot less problematic when your team is dominating because you have time to dampen the delays. When you're eating shit left and right every microsecond those delays starts being an actual detriment to play with.

Glad to hear it's a disaster above 50ms ping though. Worst change in pvp in ages as far as I'm concerned, because the previous system fucking worked.

They have trouble with z-axis and aoe skills. E.g. if there is a player above you. The aoe skill might hit him, but not the players around him. It used to work both ways though, in the past e.g. mch had flamethrower, if he used it above you, you were still hit even through walls below it. Famous example was Astrologos middle CE generator that people fought for, and under it, the CE were respawning as items to be picked up, those who picked it up got hit out of nowhere with flamethrower dots. I think they fixed that - but, we have a whole range of new skills now performing weirdly.
You can also wonder why on CloudNine map, you become invulnerable once you get send up flying. Or why CC maps in general offer very limited z-Axis potential. And why they still removed the RivalWings and Frontline maps with the most z-axis heights to this day.
Anyway I think it affects line and cone aoe the most. Pointblank Aoe seem less an issue.

Another weird thing, that has existed since a very long time, is that you can backflip, teleport or dash from a very high point down to ground level - while not taking any fall damage. This makes jobs with these abilities a lot stronger. Also the way these teleports work - you can aim against a wall diagonally, it will still try to move you behind the wall if the edge of it is close. Basically instantly putting you behind a wall, breaking line of sight if you aim it right. This is all because skills don't have to be placed on the ground, that would give you the error message that the destination is not in visible range, but are performed without that check anyway automatically. Another example of making game easier to play, that backfires and making it more seemingly glitchy - players have to figure out the bottlenecks of the engine to perform well - instead of just focusing on their skills and strategy. An awful way to improve.

Flamethrower ignored walls in the days of Feast and it had nothing to do with the vertical axis. It was a feature of the ability and a damn cool one that allowed you to flush out opponents from behind those thin palisade walls in crystal tower proving grounds. It's never been fixed because it worked as intended and was one of the few abilities that prevented Feast MCH to be total garbo. However, due to the z-axis shenanigans, FT like any other skill was unable to hit everything too far above or below your cone position.

But yes the vertical axis is a problem in FLs.