Quote Originally Posted by Gwenkatsu View Post
Area effect fires, I clearly stand outside of the area, still get hit. That's not a feature - that's a bug.
It's not a bug. It's just that the way the game functions is not clearly conveyed to new players, so they often mistake it either for a bug, bad net code or them being unskilled (usually they assume the last one).

They assume it snapshots when the animation goes off, but that's too late to avoid it. Or they assume it snapshots when they actually die, but it's much earlier than that. And that's actually intentional and how it's coded.

Quote Originally Posted by Uzephi View Post
Snapshotting is due to bad network handling.
It's not, or not entirely. In most cases, the snapshot goes off when the cast bar completes, then the animation follows it. Around the time the animation goes off is when it actually carries out the process of reducing your HP or killing your character.

Regardless of their netcode, they could begin the animation at the start of the cast bar then have the animation going off align with the cast bar completion.

I also don't think it's just their netcode. Their server processes everything slowly in general. If you've ever fought the S rank Bone Crawler and seen it knock a huge crowd of players back, it takes a good few seconds to push everyone back. A few seconds is ages in a fight. The same thing happens if you wall pull Sastasha unsynced and use your AoE - it takes 3 seconds to cycle through all the enemies and apply your AoE damage. We are talking about server machines with what I would hope is a lot of cores and they intentionally take 3 seconds to iterate 32 times. I hope I am missing something, because I seriously struggle to believe this is necessary.

Their netcode is a problem though. Specifically, they use TCP instead of UDP. If you know anything about video game networking, you know that UDP is the protocol of choice for video games... so naturally, SE chose TCP.