Animation Lock: Why don't you like it?

[Zantetsuken]

The animation lock most of us are complaining about and don't want is the animation lock where you SHOULD be able to move, realistically, but cannot, because you are arbitrarily rooted in place. Where the desired movement isn't logically possible, it still makes sense to keep the player in place. You lock the player not based on the animation itself, but based on when it makes sense to be able to move or not.

I agree with the above, but too many here are asking for a complete removal of the the animation lock -- throwing the baby of 'realism' out with the bathwater of inconvenience.

Good gameplay mechanics also avoid issues with your second possibility: If the gameplay mechanics are well made and you move in the middle of your attack, if you are not in a position where you can hit the enemy, then that hit misses. simple as that. That is, you design the WS so the hits are actually timed at various points in the attack (to correspond with where the animation is actually "striking"). Then you do checks at these times as to whether the player is facing the target or not.

Even with improved server-client reaction time, I doubt latency will be low enough to allow this many checks per second in ARR.

As I said before, 1.0 latency really made animation lock seem much worse than it actually was. And the fact that battles were designed without latency and animation lock in mind was the only thing that made players aware enough to complain about it.