Why no one addressed the elephant in the room

[LuciaGreene]

I love RDM and have played it since before the change. Honestly, RDM is a bit OP. The delay of being able to hit an ogcd after a gcd has held me back from going in for a quick kill. It feels awkward and clunky. The game play isn't as smooth as PVE.

[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.

[Commander_Justitia]

I was really hoping that they replace dark knight's quietus with a faster hitting move, as quietus took a while to come out even though it's so important to DRK's health restoration. But not only does impalement have just as slow of an animation as quietus, the new hitlag makes this move even slower! These types of circle aoe moves that don't require a target, should either have a larger radius or come out faster to compensate for netlag.

I barely hit people in frontline with holy shield wall, while literally running on top of their character models. They should be slowed if the barrier is not destroyed. It is really unreliable.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

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.

[Loggos]

"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 agree with you that latency is a major issue but I would like to dispute the aspect of "it can be learned" a little because at least for me (also living in Germany) the hits have not just shifted from instant to delayed activation. Many actions have become straight-up unpredictable (for me).

• For example, I heal up in time (according to the feedback on my screen) and I still get killed by a nin LB in one situation. And in another situation I survive.
• Sometimes I finish my casts even though a person has long run out of my LoS and it still hits them. Then again, sometimes the same cast is canceled when the target runs out of range.
• Sometimes purify/guard works normally, sometimes I - and I am not exaggerating - have to press the button several times until something happens.
• Sometimes my LB goes off at the press of a button, sometimes it's completely unresponsive for several button presses even though I am explicitly not doing anything else and there is no GCD rolling. Really, really maddening when it happens in very critical situations where there's really no room for this kind of random misfiring.
• Sometimes in a match I can chain an oCGD to a GCD in advance and at other times my oGCD button press isn't registered. It doesn't matter if it's an offensive oGCD, a defensive one like Tempera Coat or my palette switch. It is legit random when they work and when they don't. I've paid close attention to it over the last weeks and it has been a source of frustration until today.
  (I also tested it on a dummy and there it's a lot more reliable but it still doesn't work sometimes. I suppose in matches where there is a lot more data from up to 10 players that has to be computed at once, actions "getting lost" in the queue of everything that's taking place becomes more extreme, esp. with bad latency.)

The thing is that this makes my muscle memory unreliable because what used to work automatically now may or may not fail me. This can really throw me off and yank me out of my rhythm/my flow. It's difficult to adapt to that because sometimes your muscle memory is right. So you get very mixed/paradoxical feedback/(automatic) conditioning over the course of several matches.

I know that the netcode pre 7.1 wasn't perfect and some issues we are currently experiencing already existed before. But it is my impression that the problems have been exacerbated a lot with the update. I don't remember being nearly as frustrated by the unreliability of my actions before the update even though my latency should be more or less the same.

If it was just a different timing I could adjust. But the fact that I have no way of predicting which situation I'm going to get makes planning ahead much harder because the execution of my actions turns into a bit of a gamble.

[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.

[Mawlzy]

I guess it's possible there are just some gremlins adding to inconsistency, which magnifies the frustration that we so rarely get a straight answer from the devs.

As an example, with Blota I'll sometimes get the chain animation indicating I've snagged something in range, then it just vanishes. What does that mean exactly? Something has clearly been detected. Did it just time simultaneously with the target hitting purify? It's like the business with the skill "working" since it goes on CD, but nothing absolutely happening.

We've always had to work around issues like this to some extent, but there are now multiple situations where we simply don't know what's going on. Or at least I don't.

[Valence]

Not gonna lie I've also been puzzled by the blota animation doing nothing to me a couple of times, and it got me really wondering because I sure as hell didn't have purify up. Guess I ran out of range and the chain lacked the reach or something due to the delay? This sounds fun for an ability that's supposed to be used... from afar.

[Mawlzy]

Not gonna lie I've also been puzzled by the blota animation doing nothing to me a couple of times, and it got me really wondering because I sure as hell didn't have purify up. Guess I ran out of range and the chain lacked the reach or something due to the delay? This sounds fun for an ability that's supposed to be used... from afar.

Yeah it's puzzling because it seems to both register and not register. No idea how in a deterministic algorithm that can happen.

[JuneBuggy]

The hit detection has been so bad as NIN I avoid using hyosho at all in my matches now because it's a better damage gain to use raiju or gokka over it...