@Wikku
Feel the powers of server-side hit verification.
Try using Spadille
Try Port Forwarding
Try joining servers close to you/with least ping
Afford a better internet connection

"localhost"
i am playing on server that is hosted on my computer

i dont know son
if you lag at localhost you better aint make no servers

it lags sometimes, e.g. when i make many blocks, not always
i can play on normal servers

One of pyspades' features is that it doesn't have server hit verification, so you'll get 0.52 smoothness on 0.54.

Rant time.

I rarely play this game anymore, but I decided to check out the Reddit server a few minutes ago to see if this TDM was any good.

Skip the BS; let's get to the point. I was 10 feet away from an enemy (seemed like I was even closer than that, but I'll be generous)and fired two rounds directly at his head (blood spray was visible for both rounds).

Guess what happened? The first round did absolutely nothing, even though it hit him directly in the forehead and the blood spray was clearly visible. The second round hit him in the face as well and it killed him. I win.

I left the server after a little while (I was accused of hacking about 3 times; my name was "Outer Haven" for those of you were on at the time) and joined the aloha uswest island server.

I spawned right next to an enemy who was camping our base from a little island to the south. I jumped in the water, crouched (he was crouched as well), and fired two rounds. The first round hit him directly in the face (once again, the blood spray was visible), the second round missed him entirely. He then one-shotted me. I lose.

Now, if pyspades servers have server-side hit verification disabled (which I believe they do; I doubt its creators would purposely lie to us), then why in god's name is this garbage still happening? I barely even play this game anymore and yet the few minutes that I actually spend trying to enjoy it, this bullshit pops up. Not once, but twice in a row. I don't mean this as a threat directed towards Ben (since I am only one player, what I want/don't want doesn't mean shit), but if this crap is going to continue, you can count me out. It was never like this prior to 0.53/0.54.

As a matter of fact, I found another thread that I had posted in while I was searching for this thread. My opinion his done a complete 180 since then:

http://ace-spades.com/forums/topic.php?id=2836

This failure to detect legitimate hits coupled with the rifle's cone have almost completely destroyed the smoothness and enjoyability of Ace of Spades.

Disclaimer: all this crap that I just posted is only my opinion. It seems as if most people are quite content with the game's current state, that is perfectly fine.

Now that I think of it, the only reason why I bother to voice my opinion so adamantly is because this is one of the few gaming communities that I have been to where the developers at least attempt to listen to the players. Then again, this game is free of charge, so I don't really expect my wishes to be met nor would I hold any grudge towards Ben for not meeting them; this is his game.

EDIT: After posting this, I realized it's a wall of text. Sorry.

Its not just the lagging person who gets the benefit, the person with high latency also has problems hitting people.

Seems fine for me if you play on a server that is physically near to you though. Even the SMG is good at close range.

I'm in the UK so only ever pick a server that has a ping listed as over about 125. Anything under 100 will almost certainly be in america so chose wisely. If it is a pyspades server try typing "/ping" in chat and see what you get. I get about 35ms on my server, bu the mian page lists it as about 140ms.

My ping for most of the aloha servers is between 30 and 50. Not directed at you or anything, but I've had this argument before and there just is no excuse.

This big server-side shift (which is only going to continue, according to Ben) has just ruined the game for me.

Edit: I've edited the title, sorry for the rudeness

I just went back into the Reddit server to test my ping (as I never knew of the /ping command). 16 freaking ms and I'm still experiencing this bullshit. This is the exact same argument that I constantly bring up regarding people with higher ping having an advantage (just like it is in every game with server-side hit detection).

http://i.imgur.com/wyBU1.png

@Galaxy: In response to your claim of there never having been an aimbot for AoS, I'm not entirely sure that's true... there were a few instances in AoS a while back when a single player would be continously spawnkilling the entire rival team (those people got votekicked pretty quickly... ). I don't really see how that would be possible without an aimbot.

I haven't seen any definite signs of aimbot use recently, though. I find people that seem like aimbotters about as often as I get accused myself, so I've put any recent incidents down to skill and/or lag.

The whole aimbot thing was definitely blown way out of proportion at any stage, though, even during the time when there might have been a few actual aimbots.

Insurgent's explanation is right. Higher ping doesn't give you an advantage in server-side hit detection. You may be having a bad experience, but the player with higher ping is probably having an even worse one.

Who knows what AoS is actually doing, but generally server-side detection is perfectly reasonable. The shooting around corners problem is the best compromise (the game designer has two choices when one player shoots another player who has ducked around the corner on his machine but that hasn't made it to the shooter's machine yet: either hit or miss. Hitting causes shooting around corners; missing cause "i shot this guy in the head and he didn't die". Most developers choose the former). Client-side hit detection has shooting-around-corners problem as well, plus it can be hacked.

It's possible AoS has flaws though that make the server-side hit detection worse than normal games. For example, a bug where it's not accounting for history properly, or a network protocol that means that maybe the packet where you shot your gun got lost and the server never even knows you fired, or something.

The way pyspades works in regards to hit detection is exactly the same as it was in 0.52, so I'm not sure what to attribute your problem to.

Hit packets are guaranteed. That means they can get lost, but they'll be resent until the server says "OK, I got it". Even then, you could have 16ms ping and still have a lossy/unstable connection. Are you on wifi by any chance?

Insurgent's explanation is right. Higher ping doesn't give you an advantage in server-side hit detection. You may be having a bad experience, but the player with higher ping is probably having an even worse one.

I can understand that pertaining to the player with higher ping not having an advantage when it comes to shooting you. My argument is that it is harder for the player with lower ping to shoot them because that player's "solid image" is further away from their true location when compared to a low-pinged player. This same thing is clearly visible in games such as Halo for PC, SA:MP (San Andreas Multiplayer) and Team Fortress 2.

@1337101

I remember Lexsym saying that she was the only person with an aimbot and what she described was pretty much the same as what you've stated (killing the entire enemy team at their spawn). Search the forums and you can find the thread that she posted that in.

@hompy

No, I have my desktop plugged directly into the router. I'm not bashing pyspades as, like you said, the hit detection is the same as 0.52. My problem is (with all due respect, since I know absolutely nothing about coding/scripting) that Ben's code is just weird. There should be no reason why I am seeing the tell-tale signs of server-side hit detection if it is disabled on pyspades servers.

Of course, when reviewing all of this, it seems as if I am the greatest common factor. Apparently, I am one of the only people who is experiencing this, so I don't really expect it to be "fixed."

I'm just bitching.

Edit: Once again, I realized too late that this is another wall of text, sorry.

Ah, this isn't about bashing, it's about fixing stuff. You aren't the only one, I get people going "I hit him and he didn't die" regularly. And it's happened to me too, a few times.

Ben ought to make a poll to see if more players want server or client side hit verification. What's the worst that could happen? Oh wait....

TO....MANY....ARGUEMENTS

Yeah, sorry about that. Just consider this to be another bitching-and-moaning meaningless rant session from yours truly.

lol
i'll get the popcorn

@Galaxy: I know she had one... I suppose if it was just her aimbotting the others could have been cases of pro that were blown out of proportion. I still remember running into an earlier player named [VIP]Banner back around 0.30 or so who was hacking in just about every way possible... couldn't even be headshotted, and made headshots every time. Watching someone flying the in the air spewing grenades was funny for about 2 seconds.

My argument is that it is harder for the player with lower ping to shoot them because that player's "solid image" is further away from their true location when compared to a low-pinged player.

Well, I don't know what you've observed personally in those games, and I don't know what the common wisdom about those games is.

But I've read the papers about how Bungie and Valve's networking work, and that doesn't make any sense. The server knows what the player is seeing (because the server is sending it to the player), and the server knows at what point in time (in the past, from the server's point-of-view) the player shoots (because the player's shooting packet says so, and says it relative to the stuff the server is sending), so the server knows whether things the player is shooting at were at the place the player was aiming on the player's machine (barring packet loss).

So in a proper implementation of server-side hit testing, a person with high packet loss will have a worse experience then a person with low packet loss, because the server will have an inaccurate view of what the high-packet-loss person is seeing (because the server doesn't know about the lost packets). A person with a high ping versus a person with low ping, both with no packet loss, will have equal experiences with server-side hitting, at least until the ping gets so high that the server isn't tracking enough data (at which point the person with high pings loses).

Screenshot of the server's POV: the actual model is drawn at the place where the server has the enemy at the time the shot is verified, red shows where the player saw the guy at the time he shot, blue shows the server's estimate of where the guy was at the time the player shot that it uses to do the server-side hit test. (They don't match exactly, but well enough, and this is pretty ping-independent, and only gets worse in the face of packet loss.)

Again, I don't know that AoS implements all this stuff correctly. I just know that the standard AAA-game algorithm these days doesn't have the problem I think you're claiming they do.

(If the server didn't account for the lag in that screenshot, then obviously you would miss in this case and it would be harder to hit high-ping targets. But actually the high-ping people would also have a problem because their 'shoot' command also goes through a high ping, so by the time it gets there even a low-ping player will have moved just as far. It turns out the amount of visible lag if you do server-side verification without lag compensation is equal to the <i>average</i> of the shooter and the shootee, so high-ping against high-ping is accurate, low-ping against low-ping is really inaccurate, and high-vs-low and low-vs-high are in the middle, but actually identical.)

I do have to wonder how much of the BS is from the dreaded cone of not-as-much-doom-as-the-shooter-would-like, and how much is from the server-side hit verification. However, I've seen a lot of messed-up stuff at close range, so the new hit verification is partly to blame.

I do know that before 0.54, I had a less freaky experience with high-ping players (why must people join servers when they have 300 milliseconds of ping?). Glitchiness happened, yes, but it was a little less common.

When I joined in 0.26, the system was pretty fun. Hits were detected client-side, so if you saw someone and shot him, he got hit and knew it. Shots also didn't cancel on death, so if someone was lagging both you and he would die. This meant that the lag had an averaging effect.

Later on, it was set so that shots cancelled on death, so if the server logged you dying first, you "lost." This could be a little problematic, but in general it meant whoever shot first in real time got the kill. I didn't like it as much as the original way, since it was possibly to headshot someone and not kill them, but it wasn't awful.

Now it's server-side, so you have to be a psychic to figure out what someone else's ping is, and where their head will be in that amount of time. Since I can't say I'm feeling particularly telepathic, this really isn't working out for me.

The biggest thing I want fixed, though, is the cone on the rifle. I'd prefer any of these hit detection/verification systems without the cone to any of them with the cone.

So many walls... my eyes.

@Kaede: Easy-to-read version:

Server-side hit verification is evil, but the rifle cone is even more evil.

1337101, it doesn't work like that.

If you shoot at a wall thinking a player will be there in the future, then you will with all certainty hit that wall. That's why what we have is called specifically server-side hit verification. The client (you) already knows who you hit, and the server only has power to nullify that hit.

Hits still happen instantly, only the server isn't very good at telling which ones it should actually invalidate.

@Hompy: I've observed a variable-lead phenomenon that would suggest otherwise; when someone's walking across a field I start shooting at normal lead and lead them more until they die. It works if I get the lead right before they get sighted in on me.

If that is actually true, that is a broken implementation of server-side hit verification (at least, broken as compared to most games). Read my long spew above for an explanation of how it should work.

@Nothings: Yes, I understood you post (good post, by the way. Solid and well-explained). It doesn't seem to work that way in AoS, at least for me.

For now, I'd really just like to have the 0.52 rifle and hit detection system back. The SMG was a fun new addition to the game, the new votekick UI is nice, and the new blocks look a whole lot better, but the old rifle and hit detection never should have changed. I miss them.

@nothings

Thanks for the elaboration, but it doesn't seem to work that way in AoS.

Anyway, here is a video showing a good example of how you have to shoot in San Andreas Multiplayer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v_FRjBPdiE

Here is a video that a friend of mine made showing some shooting in Halo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXpuIhR1XcE

I couldn't find a simple and reliable video for TF2, but you can search the internet to find countless people complaining about the horrid hit detection.

@133701

When I joined in 0.26, the system was pretty fun. Hits were detected client-side, so if you saw someone and shot him, he got hit and knew it. Shots also didn't cancel on death, so if someone was lagging both you and he would die. This meant that the lag had an averaging effect.

Wow, I never knew that (I started playing during the 0.33 era). Not getting the kill when we've both fired at what seems like the exact same time was pretty annoying. Then again, this mechanic has saved me countless times (I would see the bullet flying right towards my head, but I've killed the enemy shooter first).

@1337: I disagree with that. The server-side hit verification is the greater of the two evils. I miss the old Rifle though. ;_; /

I'm not even gonna get started on how many shots I've fired on a guy and found out that it didn't do jack.