Thread: .3 Second Positional Update Delay (Requesting Dev Response)

Originally Posted by DakkonBriefs

quoting myself to bump thread

Quoting your quote for justice.

Square Enix, do something about this issue. Say something about this issue.

If there is 0.3 seconds between the server's checks, then special attacks should take at least 1.2 seconds to execute. 0.3 in case the first check is missed, 0.6 seconds for the player to react, and 0.3 for when the server misses the fourth check.

There you go programmers.

Or here's an actual design improvement... force the game to acquire four or five consecutive positive (in the aoe) checks in order to hit. So if the game fails to make a check half way between two 0.3 second intervals, it lands in the player's favor instead of in stupidity's favor. Since the game can't accurately check whether a player is actually in the aoe, change the mechanic to one that's based on how long you are in the aoe rather than whether you were in or out on the last check.

You can't have the server wait for the client to send position update to determine whether something hits you or not. Doing this means even more lag. Currently the server decides your fate without waiting for the client and sends the result back, and we already see some pretty incredible lag. Now add another up to 0.3s (time it takes server to finally get your position) and imagine what happens? Yes, it'd usually be in favor of players if the server waited up to another 0.3s to make its decision, but that'd still be horrendous lag. There is absolutely no way around the lag if you don't trust the client to make the decision. This is why the client makes the decision in every other MMORPG.

Originally Posted by complexxL9

SE simply does not care about this that much, control is not king here. They think people can live with it, because it is a matter of "taste". And they are right, there are plenty of clueless people, who never had better experience in mmorpg, and don't know what we are talking about. And those who do, will be back on their epic quest, to find another wow killer, soon enough. Wildstar next in line.

I think you'd literally have to be living under a rock to not know what a modern MMORPG control feels like. Sometimes it feels to me that none of the devs ever played a MMORPG besides FF11 which is why they thought this control is okay. Heck they didn't even see the need to put in the ability to jump in 1.0.

Originally Posted by Astarica

You can't have the server wait for the client to send position update to determine whether something hits you or not. Doing this means even more lag. Currently the server decides your fate without waiting for the client and sends the result back, and we already see some pretty incredible lag. Now add another up to 0.3s (time it takes server to finally get your position) and imagine what happens? Yes, it'd usually be in favor of players if the server waited up to another 0.3s to make its decision, but that'd still be horrendous lag. There is absolutely no way around the lag if you don't trust the client to make the decision. This is why the client makes the decision in every other MMORPG.

Duration checks rather than one inaccurate check wouldn't generate lag.

Originally Posted by Citizen_Thom

Duration checks rather than one inaccurate check wouldn't generate lag.

Huh? There's nothing you can do that'd allow you to have accurate information without violating casuality. Let's have this hypothetical timeline:
Time 0.0s - Client sends update, player is in AE.
Time 0.01s - Server receives update from client at 0.0s. During this time, player has now moved out of AE.
Time 0.3s - Client sends update, player is out of AE

How can the server possibly know the accurate player information when it's not scheduled to receive the accurate information 0.29s later? Right now, the server doesn't wait and just sends back 'you didn't dodge that' to the client. If the server waited, it would be able to make a better decision, but you'd have even more lag, and that's not acceptable either. In this case, the server would have to wait for an extra 0.29s compared to what it already does now. While this will generally end up being favorable to players, this means if you really do fail to dodge the AE now you can go REALLY far before you get any update.

Originally Posted by Astarica

How can the server possibly know the accurate player information when it's not scheduled to receive the accurate information 0.29s later?

The way to solve / combat this is when in doubt the client wins in this case.
However everything is server side controlled here which causes these delays in periodic updates. I get the reasoning behind the majority of it as you can 'protect' the data although they have done a piss poor job at accomplishing that so I would suspect this is not an intentional design but just a poor one. Collision detection in online gaming is not that difficult to accomplish there are some great articles linked around explaining this in some simple an technical aspects.