Ability Delay -- Character Responsiveness (This will make or break SW:TOR)

[Tiron_Raptor]

Idk its happening with Ravage ability for me(Juggernaut), exclusively on death blows on 1st or 2nd channeled tick.

 

EDIT: Possibly when other people finish of the target while I'm channeling, now when I think about it.

 

Yeah, I just went down to alderaan to double check: I can fire pulse cannon, interrupt it with riot strike, follow up with a stockstrike (which I activate BEFORE it comes off GCD), and then fire an ion pulse, all in very quick succession with no apparent delays.

[Sadix]

This is also very obvious with the shadow strike ability shadows get(its the backstab). Ill stun a mob and be behind them and instead of going off my character will just put her hand up, turn the lightsaber into a shakeweight, and jerk the thing off.

 

Slightly amusing, highly annoying.

[ATeyken]

responsiveness is king - I know of no good games with bad player input handling, most other buggy features (sound/graphic) can mostly be ignored but interface and input are my only ways of connecting with my virtual avatar.

 

<silly>

Remember, your providing us with a virtual avatar, if the controls are bad/unresponsive we have an avatar with cerebral palsy.. and not many players feel heroic playing a spastic Jedi - that kinda ruins your immersion.

</silly>

 

-edit-

Cover seems really broken, I don't know if this is a related subject.

When i cast an ability from cover it will very often break halfway through.

Also, rolling into cover can but you into spaces you cannot be, getting you stuck (20k repairs on that account so far at level 46).

Edited January 4, 2012 by ATeyken

[Enerzeal]

My worst bugs are all to do with Ravage, the most broken ability in pve, pvp, it doesn't matter where you are or who your using it on.

 

1, Charging will more often than not cause Ravage to consider your character still moving, and it will not work.

 

2, When you do use it after a charge and it fails, it more often than not will keep you rooted in place, and play out the animation doing 0 damage.

 

3, Lastly when using Ravage and killing someone the animation tends to not cancel, the root not leave, and the animation to play out regardless of a dead opponent.

 

Another lesser bug is to do with animations all together.

 

1, Force scream has a bad habit of beginning its animation, stopping milliseconds afterwards and starting again, delivering the attack.

 

2, Crushing Blow also suffers the same issue, starting, restarting and delivering the attack.

 

Of course I agree with the interrupt business. GCD in effect means no interrupting that attack so you wait before delivering an attack to interrupt theirs instead....

[DeathHenk]

This is also very obvious with the shadow strike ability shadows get(its the backstab). Ill stun a mob and be behind them and instead of going off my character will just put her hand up, turn the lightsaber into a shakeweight, and jerk the thing off.

 

Slightly amusing, highly annoying.

 

Happened to me alot. Either server side mobs are facing different sides than client side, or I don't know what the front of a person looks like. Looks really clumsy and is really hard for me as a player to anticipate as my target is clearly facing his/her back to me.

Edited January 4, 2012 by DeathHenk

[Tiron_Raptor]

Okay, on very close examination and some careful testing, I did find a VERY slight delay. It definitely feels like some kind of latency issue, but I'm not sure if it's in the client, the server, or inbetween. I'm thinking possibly client: it's registering the key hit immediately, as least as far as the button effects go, but it seeming takes it a short time to actually process and relay the attack. Could be the server, could be netcode, I have no idea.

 

Trick being, I noticed it seemed to be in part related to exactly how late in the GCD I hit the next ability. The later I hit it, the longer the delay after the GCD ended it was. When I started trying to hit them earlier, I found that the 0.5 second ability queue window was rather short and slightly fiddly.

 

So I turned the queue time up to 1 second, and started hitting them even earlier. The delay after the GCD ends is VASTLY reduced or outright eliminated when I hit it early enough.

 

It's almost like it's taking the client a bit to process something between hitting the slot and actually firing the ability...

 

And with a bit further testing I think I might have it. I think it might actually be the ability action queue itself.

 

If I wait until the ability is off GCD to hit it, it goes immediately more or less. If I hit it early enough in the GCD with the action queue on and set to 1.0, it goes off close to as soon as the GCD ends. If I try to time it so I hit it precisely after the GCD ends with the action queue off, sometimes I miss and nothing happens, sometimes I hit it and it goes off instantly. If I turn the queue back on and try the same thing, when I miss there's a delay before it goes off, when I don't miss it still goes off instantly.

 

It seems like the action queue itself is either timed incorrectly or taking longer than it should to fire an ability, almost like it has some sort of minimum delay or processing time built into it.

[jeepoverland]

Thank you, now I can stop making my garbled and unorganized gripe posts and just bump this masterwork of necessity.

[Daex]

Bleh ability queue is weird indeed. They should have figured out the best time and lock it. I don't even know what to set it on. .75 and 1 are bad because it's enough time for me to change my mind about next ability and 0.25 and 0.5 is sometimes not enough with these problems (if they are even caused by it).

 

EDIT: And setting it to 0 does indeed cause those issues happened to me as well.

Edited January 4, 2012 by Daex

[Liavain]

Does turning the Ability Queue to 0.0 help?

[Tiron_Raptor]

Bleh ability queue is weird indeed. They should have figured out the best time and lock it. I don't even know what to set it on. .75 and 1 are bad because it's enough time for me to change my mind about next ability and 0.25 and 0.5 is sometimes not enough with these problems (if they are even caused by it).

 

it looks very much to me like the problem is the ability queue not reliably activating abilities precisely when the GCD finishes. A bit of testing on alderaan on elites much lower than me, and it appeared that the delay ONLY occured when the ability was activated BEFORE the GCD ended with the queue active.

 

If I managed to hit the ability PRECISELY when the GCD ended, or just after, it fired immediately, queue on or off. But if the queue was on, and I hit it just the tiniest bit early, there was a very palpable delay before it went off. If the queue was off, nothing happened at all.

[Daex]

Does turning the Ability Queue to 0.0 help?

 

From my experience it only makes it worse. Only thing that really works as Tiron said above is waiting for GCD to be completely free. In that case you are more or less safe from latency.

[Rtwozero]

This is especially evident for snipers. We have a talent which allows us to use snipe instantly after going into cover. However the snipe keybind has to be spammed as the cover animation makes the 'instant' snipe only usable after around 1 sec of being in cover.

[Hirokinae]

I've noticed the delays predominately when i am trying to use my cooldowns. When I am using my vanguard's "reserve powercell" or "recharge powercell" on their own, they activate fine, but if i try to use "reserve powercell" after using an ability, it forces me to finish my previous animation BEFORE i can hit reserve powercell, and on top of that, will sometimes even burn my GCD even though it should be an off-GCD cooldown. Maybe it has something to do mostly with animations, and the gaming forcing you to finish them before the next can be activated.

[Scather]

In addition to ability delay, there is also instance where non-gcd skills you don't activate. You have to use a gcd skill first to break it.

[Dontdieplez]

I went and upgraded my computer runnin 2.9 CPU ati 5750 graphics card and 12 gb of ram. I noticed little to no difference I still experience extreme lag in warzone and huge ability delay. Even when I load up my game to play trying to load up a planet still takes 5 minuites it's ridiculous I've done all that I can to improve this game and its been a waste of my time. Please for the love of god bioware fix this at least for the next patch if you don't have it fixed in this patch.

[translucentwolf]

message deleted. Edited January 4, 2012 by translucentwolf

[Krashh]

Firstly, I'd like to say I love this game, but the Ability delay is getting damn frustrating sometimes. Why do the damn animations have to take precedent over gameplay. The amount of times my Sith Juggernaut has a spasm when I spam a button is rediculous.

 

I've played WoW since it's release and I still play it. I play multiple games, because I enjoy games. Back at the start of WoW 7 years ago, I had bad internet and I would get 600-800ms regularly, since I am in Australia. Even though there was latency there, playing a character on wow, was still playable. Sure I missed the odd heal because of the latency issue, but my abilities were still responsive from my point of view.

 

Now, I get sub 200ms in WoW and I get sub 200ms in SWTOR and the use of the abilities in SWTOR are just too damn clunky compared to WoW. When stuff you want to happen, doesn't happen, it get's frustrating.

 

I'm just wondering, what on earth the alpha and beta testers were doing and what were Bioware doing before this games release. I'm sure this problem popped up and was known about back then. Were there just a bunch of "yes men"? Is the Hero Engine the problem?

 

That all said, I'm still going to be playing SWTOR in the forceable future, since I am actually enjoying the game, enough, even with it's flaws. I just hope Bioware fix the Ability Delay problem sooner rather than later.

Edited January 4, 2012 by Krashh

[Vindor]

Not true: I distinctly remember being dismounted off my black war tiger on more than a few occasions in just this very fashion.

 

The problem here is that you're confusing the spell animation with the spell EFFECT. The former is a purely cosmetic effect rendered by your client to look good, with no actual meaning and without any effect on what actually happens. The SERVER determines what actually occurs, and overrides any cosmetic guesses the client has made in the meantime.

 

Part of the reason WoW LOOKED so smooth is that they took the cosmetic effect one further: they set it up so that the client would delay showing damage until the spell effect appeared to hit the target. If you successfully cast a fireball at a target, the damage was determined and sent back immediately, but the client would 'hold back' on relaying the damage until the fireball appeared to hit the target, to help disguise the latency.

 

You can actually observe this in action: there's a maximum timeout on how long it will hold back the damage. If you fly away from a ranged caster firing spells at you with an epic flight mount, you can actually outrun most spell effects. You can literally fly circles around them, and never ever be hit if you do it right. But you WILL take the damage eventually anyway, usually well out of attack range from the target and many seconds after the spell was cast at you. Even though the spell's 'bolt' is still following you around. If you then slow down and let the bolts catch up, they will all hit you, and your character will play the 'argh I'm hit animation', but no additional damage will be done.

 

An additional manifestation of this sometimes occurs when you are killed by a ranged spell: upon occasion, you'll die before the spell hits you, and it will then proceed to hit your corpse.

 

Wow has the same exact problems and limitations of latency of other games, they just hide it exceptionally well, fooling people into thinking it's smooth and perfect.

 

Ever chased someone while playing a melee class, and been told you were out of range even though they appeared to be just barely in front of you? Ever been chased by a melee class, and been taking hits from them even though you appeared to be a great distance away? Both of these are latency effects.

 

Edit: A further manifestation. You hit an ability that appears to be off cooldown. Your GCD starts on all abilities, then stops a fraction of a second later as they all clear early. Your client thought you got the ability off successfully. The server told it otherwise, for whatever reason.

 

Yes, the ability delay in itself isnt such a big deal. It could look smoother but its not a deal breaker for me.

 

Animations loop, ability not working, phantom channeling kinda are.

Edited January 4, 2012 by Vindor

[Jandoss]

This delay ruining this game, yes

Does not matter how much of a great content will be in this game, when you click on ablity and wait/hope it will actually happen.

 

(you click on speeder, start moving and get dismounted)

 

fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it

[Abetterone]

I do not care about the bugs, please just fix the combat responsiveness, I promise

I re-subcribe.

[ScartStorm]

Right now, on a freshly rebooted Ahto City, I am getting zero ability lag on Tattoiine. It's actually pretty playable this way. Who knew?!

[Herrou]

Right now, on a freshly rebooted Ahto City, I am getting zero ability lag on Tattoiine. It's actually pretty playable this way. Who knew?!

 

Whut, they changed anything?

[Senatsu]

Bumping this thread a bit^^

[Rezoo]

My character spasming when I cast my melee abilities is why I have just stopped playing.

 

Feels like my character is fighting with itself to get a cast off.

 

To me, I think the issue is that when using abilities too quick, the latest ability press, even if the same ability, cancels out your animation for the first ability press.

 

Just don't let actions cancel/override eachother and problem is fixed.

Edited January 4, 2012 by Rezoo

[Flagg]

I must have posted in beta about this 300 times. Keep this thread alive and show your support. The utterly idiotic animations being a bounding box for abilities and gcd is my #1 mots reviled thing in this game.

 

Also your should "fire off" your abilities on mouse RELEASE not PRESS, which compiles the problems with "ability lag".

 

3 is lightning strike, 4 is shock: I press and release 3, cast time begins, I press and hold 4, the millisecond my cast bar hits 0.0 i release 4 and shock goes off. regardless of where my arms are, what little animation you have going on. kill it and start the new one. Seriously, There are no words to describe how utterly important it is to get this fixed. It's the one area of the game you interact with 100% of the time. to do anything but move you must have the ui. If the ui is crappy and unresponsive, everything else will suffer from it too. PLEASE SET THIS TO TOP PRIORITY!!!

Edited January 4, 2012 by Flagg