Forget (insert other F word here) Ballistics

Hit Registration is at an all time low for me....

UAC5 suck! I have watched me light up enemy mechs and pump 50-60 rounds in to the CT. That should be 250 damage minimum.

Well Grimm, maybe it is just the UAC5, try something else...

AC5s suck! I've done the same god damn thing, this time in to teh BACK of a Trenchbucket (20 rounds) and he just keeps on going.

Well Grimm, maybe that was just an isolated incident...

So on another match I did the same thing into the red CT of a Stalker. The guy even over heated, powered down, took 10 more shots to the CT, powered back up again and killed me with missiles.

I think someone needs to get their hit detection programmers and fire them. Either that or admit your product is broken, stop watching the friggen SeaHawks games and hire the right people so that we aren't experiencing the same set backs we did a year ago.

EDIT: Before anyone says its ping... guys, I have a 25 ping most times at my worst. I'm practically sitting on the server other times with an 18. This shit should not be happening.

EDIT 2: It seems like anything that has an extended duration of impact (ie: beam duration, LRMs in a stream or guided missiles) work fine but anything that has a single point of impact (ACs, PPCs etc) doesn't work worth shit lately.

 

Yeah it is with the 64 bit client.

 

One thing I noticed a while back is that beam weapons seemed to work better. What I realized after a while is this: If you have weapons that do multiple hits or ticks, or if you fire multiple weapons at once, then some or all may fail to register. So it may look like lasers are "better" or that they aren't borked, but what's really happening is you're seeing half your ticks hit and the cursor just stays red for the entire duration because it stays red long enough to give you time to notice that it was red.

I have at various times seen large SRM alphas visibly hit 80% of the missiles on a light, but half its armor blinks light yellow.
I have seen lights standing still take a full laser alpha that should be 30+ and the component blinks orange.
I have hit with a 4xPPC alpha and done 30 damage.

In all of those cases, the crosshair blinks red, but I'm not getting the full damage that I should.

 

It is the lag thing due to holidays, things get choppy real bad cause of it.

 

Lag? With an 18ms ping?

 

Ping is latency, not lag.

Vast simplification:

Ping is measured occasionally, and it's just round-trip time to the server. It doesn't measure (much) in the way of processing time for the server, as echoing the ping packet takes pretty much nothing. Most server network cards can actually handle it without needing to burden the CPU at all.

Lag, especially lag with hits/collision detection (such as weapons fire colliding with a mech...) must be processed by the CPU. Ping won't show when the CPU is overloaded. Time rewinding (HSR in MWO) can actually cause lag in attempting to compensate for latency, especially for low-latency players interacting with high-latency players.

So it's not just your ping that matters, it's also the other guy's ping and the state of the server.

 

Was thinking about the server side issue indeed.
If you notice things get a bit choppy these day or two without ping going up or framerate dropping, so it is something else.

 

I have exactly the same problem with UAC 5's and AC 5's atm... ergo why I've changed out of my ballistics heavy CW deck the last few days. Had the problem ever since they had to fix the laser detection problem that arrived with CW. Hit detection on lasers is great though atm so I'm not sure its either lag or ping.

 

Either way, let's see if the French Ballistic problem would be fixed after the holiday hype.
The F word is French, right?

 

Thanks for the explanation!

I figured their idea of HSR had to do with ping differential. I've noticed times where guys have hit me before I can even see them (peaking around corners etc). Because pgi can't afford regional servers they do have to try and find balance between me and the guy in Australia.

This is the only game I know of where I have been worse off for being close to the server.

 

Many games use rewinding as a form of latency compensation, it's one of the only ways to do it. It's just not always as noticeable, it depends on the tuning. No single set of settings will be right for everyone, so the goal is to set the rewind amount to work best for as many players as possible. That tends to mean that people on the extremes (very low or very high ping) get a bit shafted.

 

Its this kind of shit that frustrated me though to no end.

I'm sure I'm table flipping and ranting here but this is the kind of stuff that makes me quit playing games. I can deal with OP mechs, I can deal with "oh look, another 12 man" and I can deal with the lack of content but when the core framework of the game penalizes me because I live in Canada (ie: close to the server LOL) that kind of makes me say "WTF is the point".

When a guy in Russia can land a projectile in my CT the millisecond I come around the corner (most likely just my arm and side torso are exposed on my end) then what is the point in doing anything but LRMing targets from behind hills LOL

 

Actually the UAC's seem to be back to normal for me as just dropped in them to test.

 

I changed them out to AC5s yesterday. All ballistics for me have been fucked for the last few days. To the point where I'm just running around in my super chicken sniping as I know that ERLLas actually work. I've had rounds today where my AC5s have made someone look like a Jackson Pollock painting and not kill them. I tried @Vergere "Use the repair tool" but all that did was fix some shaders that apparently weren't up to snuff.

As for UACs; the weapon is broken in that what is the point in using it? I did some testing yesterday and did 10 drops with UACs and 10 drops with AC5s and here is what I came up with; the UAC will give you either an AWESOME match or a HORRIBLE match. You will very rarely do an average match. The AC5s will always be reliable. They don't dish out damage as fast but they never jam and you have better games overall when you take your averages. It looks like the UAC gives the illusion of superiority but in actuality that is indeed just an illusion when you take your average game scores/reliability.

Of course, none of that matters when ballistics don't register.

 

ER PPCs are barely registering for me at all today.

 

The PPC used to be my primary weapon back in the jump sniper days. Then I stopped using them and haven't used them since because of bad hit registration. Now ballistics. I am very quickly running out of weapons to diversify my offensive portfolio with.

 

I just wish they would have found a way to make other mechs/weapons useful than "this mech gets a boost to that weapon!"

It's not like AK-47s have a higher rate of fire or are less prone to jamming if you're Russian.

 

Its not like the AK-47's a good weapon statistically either its just incredibly reliable.

 

That is a contradiction right there. It is one of the most widely produced weapons on the planet (everyone seems to have them) and it is very VERY reliable in all climates and conditions. It is probably one of the best weapons, statistically, out there. Sure it isn't a suitcase nuke but it will get the job done.