Leaked video - new defensive ability for NovaDive / Blackbolt (maybe other ships too)

[Bolo_Yeung]

Looks pretty overpowered for me ... but decide for yourself.

 

 

The new engine ability causes your ship to make dozen or more quick hyperspace microjumps. Every microjump act as a lock breaker (from my information - missile already in flight should relock, but it break locks from targetting ship before missile launch).

 

Looks like trollscout build will have a new useful toy... and defending the satellites will be much easier for other ships than bombers .

 

Of course I know what is tre real cause... but it looked ridiculous

Edited July 16, 2014 by Bolo_Yeung

[Danalon]

Observed that behaviour 2-3 times on live - reported those people as cheaters.

[Ryuku-sama]

Looks pretty overpowered for me ... but decide for yourself.

 

 

The new engine ability causes your ship to make dozen or more quick hyperspace microjumps. Every microjump act as a lock breaker (from my information - missile already in flight should relock, but it break locks from targetting ship before missile launch).

 

Looks like trollscout build will have a new useful toy... and defending the satellites will be much easier for other ships than bombers .

 

Of course I know what is tre real cause... but it looked ridiculous

 

Well... I wish to report a new stat for many missiles in this game

 

> 13.5km protorp.

> Protorp have now an approximated arc of 35°

> Cluster now have a fully 360° arc

> Cluster now have a 7000m range.

[Zoom_VI]

That's not hacks or a new "ability" that's called have a really ****** internet connection

[Ryuku-sama]

It isn't. I=It's called server desync and ****** server unable to follow correctly boosting ships.

[Zoom_VI]

It isn't. I=It's called server desync and ****** server unable to follow correctly boosting ships.

 

It can't follow correctly boosting ships when the correctly boosting ships have a really ****** internet connection

[Ryuku-sama]

It can't follow correctly boosting ships when the correctly boosting ships have a really ****** internet connection

 

I have 60ms steady in ground game.. even in pvp. I still get hit by such impossible missile, railgun or BLC shots...

[Verain]

I have 60ms steady in ground game.. even in pvp. I still get hit by such impossible missile, railgun or BLC shots...

 

Some small amount of client lag can be responsible for this.

 

Say I'm at a bit of latency- 400ms or something, and you are like at 0.

 

Your ship moves from point A (within LOS of me) to point B (outside of LOS) at time 0. The server moves you there at time 0. But for me, I'm still viewing stuff in the past slightly. I release a railgun at time 200ms, and my client tells the server about it. The server is ok with that (otherwise it would be literally impossible to hit- players, within reason, play the game on their client), and you get hit, despite being safe on your screen for over a fifth of a second.

 

So it should be no surprise that popping behind LOS and dying a half second later is a thing in a game like this- otherwise even small amount of latency would make the game unplayable, as in that example the server would insist I predict 400ms into the future- impossible to land a shot. The stuff OP linked is some really lucky lagging though, and definitely a gripe that I have about the satellite game (while lag that egregious and fortunate is rare, I dislike trying to peel a scout off a node, post "mines are single target", and a lagging scout is truly ludic).

[SammyGStatus]

Observed that behaviour 2-3 times on live - reported those people as cheaters.

 

You are mistaken - these people aren't cheaters. Most likely, they are having severe lag spikes. This isn't a cheat... Look at the stats of someone who's having these problems - they're horrible. Isn't the point of cheating in a PVP based game to do BETTER than everyone else? So why are their stats always horrible? No sir, you're under a false impression.

 

Lag spikes, too little bandwidth, ISP issues, SWTOR server problem to the local machine, etc. could all be the culprit. Hell, even malware can slow down a machine's internet speed at random times or even disable the wireless completely for seconds (fixed that problem two days ago on a PC). Point is, they're not cheating.

Edited July 16, 2014 by SammyGStatus

[Danalon]

There is a difference between lag and cheating. If your target only teleports when he comes inside your firing arc but moves normal otherwise it's most likely cheating and worth reporting. Edited July 16, 2014 by Danalon

[SammyGStatus]

There is a difference between lag and cheating. If your target only teleports when he comes inside your firing arc but moves normal otherwise it's cheating.

 

No it's not. You can't prove that THE ONLY TIME this happens is when he's in your reticle, and you can't verify this either. BW would take your complaint and throw it away because it's just not cheating. I have amazingly fast internet connection and, on occassion, my ship would do the same thing (rubber banding or teleportation). Listen to the IT people here Danalon - it's not related to cheating.

[XisscVekno]

Actually it can be, you can force yourself to have "lag spikes". It's called a lag switch. It interrupts the signal just enough to confuse the server. allowing you to cheat death, escape, line up a better shot, ect. These devices aren't new and are rather easy to make and are damn near impossible to detect. They've been used in FPS games for quite sometime and give the illusion that the player is having bad lag. If you look at the score board at the end of the match and they are top scorer it's more than likely a lag switch and not ****** internet.

[Bolo_Yeung]

Actually, this guy scored rather poorly.

Still., the problem is how the server handles lag - friendly to lagging players, horrible for those who shoot at them. (updating the ship position when resyncing according to client data - i.e. flying straight (lag spike starts) - client is turning , on server he is still flying straight(spike ends) server moves the ship to client-reported position (potential for exploits!))...

[BattleDress]

Actually, this guy scored rather poorly.

Still., the problem is how the server handles lag - friendly to lagging players, horrible for those who shoot at them. (updating the ship position when resyncing according to client data - i.e. flying straight (lag spike starts) - client is turning , on server he is still flying straight(spike ends) server moves the ship to client-reported position (potential for exploits!))...

 

Look at the video again, He finished 1st on the score board. This is a W.T.F. moment

 

Edit: My mistake, he did score poorly. But still, W.T.F.?

Edited July 16, 2014 by BattleDress

[Ryuku-sama]

Look at the video again, He finished 1st on the score board. This is a W.T.F. moment

 

Eh.. the leaper had 3 medals.. and pretty bad scores.... Follow your own advice.

[Verain]

The "warper" is not warping on his screen- he's slowly orbiting the node. The reason he seems to teleport is that once he has moved some, the game catches up. It's definitely ludicrous that it was always when he was about to get shot, but that's just funny- this is not a hack or anything like that.

[Danalon]

No it's not. You can't prove that THE ONLY TIME this happens is when he's in your reticle, and you can't verify this either. BW would take your complaint and throw it away because it's just not cheating. I have amazingly fast internet connection and, on occassion, my ship would do the same thing (rubber banding or teleportation). Listen to the IT people here Danalon - it's not related to cheating.

 

I can prove. I use the targeting computer. If one does those teleports his "portrait" is turing around erratic - this usually stops as soon as he leaves the firing arc.

 

In this video it may be lag, but there are two points why I don't believe it's lag.

1. Those teleport hacks, or whatever you want to call it, usually just teleport you out of your targets firing arc.

2. Exactly this happens and it happens everytime he's getting shot at.

That would be enough for me to report, explaining the situation and asking support to keep an eye on that player.

[Luneward]

I can prove. I use the targeting computer. If one does those teleports his "portrait" is turing around erratic - this usually stops as soon as he leaves the firing arc.

 

2. Exactly this happens and it happens everytime he's getting shot at.

That would be enough for me to report, explaining the situation and asking support to keep an eye on that player.

 

Well you didn't 'prove' anything there. And that's pretty normal behavior when you are fighting someone under the influence of a lot of lag. They seem to mysteriously only start lagging when someone is shooting at them. A much closer (though not completely accurate - I'm oversimplifying) explanation is that the server now has to put more effort into determining where your target is. Your client registering a 'hit' on the target makes the server verify that and update where the target is. Due to lag, the target is no longer where your client registered it to be, so the server now updates your client as to the new location. Since you (and possibly others) are taking shots at him, he seems to jump around the screen since his position is being updated much more frequently than it normally would.

[Verain]

I can prove. I use the targeting computer. If one does those teleports his "portrait" is turing around erratic - this usually stops as soon as he leaves the firing arc.

 

So, I'll be brief. He's not cheating because he has no way of knowing this. The video is ludicrous- the guy lags away every moment he's under reticule- but it's just happenstance. If you had an arbitrarily cunning cheat system running, it STILL wouldn't know what your enemies are doing with their mouse cursors, or even when enemies were firing. That data just isn't present on the other machines, so it can't be cheated away.

 

The most that could be possible is that the lagger is causing his lag, but the specific behavior we see in the video isn't the result of a psychic with a lag switch.

 

1. Those teleport hacks, or whatever you want to call it, usually just teleport you out of your targets firing arc.

 

Which is exactly what evasive flight does. You're just witnessing a normal evasive flight, but you're only seeing parts of it. Pretend that some guy is running all around, but your eyes are closed and you only open them in blinks- he'll appear to be teleporting around, because your closed eyes prevent you from seeing the time he spends in between. That's all this is.

 

2. Exactly this happens and it happens everytime he's getting shot at.

 

This COULD be the sign of a cheater- if you had a way to force lag, you'd do it when you were under assault in addition to flying evasively, after all- but I think that's still unlikely, and shouldn't be anywhere close to your first guess.

 

Much more importantly, this player is performing very poorly. It's likely he's suffering for his lag.

[Danalon]

When people are lagging they usually fly in the direction that was last submittet to the server. Then they warp to the new location. They can't be locked on most of the time, simply because the server doesn't know where they are.

 

Also if someone keeps teleporting just in the exact moment he enters my firing arc (I'm not talking about shooting or locking on, just being inside that circle, even without being in weapons range) and does that for 20 seconds, then stops teleporting while I look in another direction (as I said, you can see those teleports because of the portrait moving erratic) and then starts again as I try to look at him then I will report that person for cheating no matter how hard you all try to convince me that "this is just lag and totally normal".

Edited July 17, 2014 by Danalon

[Luneward]

What would the portrait have to do with anything? All the portrait does is shows you its current facing relative to you. Any time a server updates its location the portrait would change. And that's part of the problem with human perception. We view things through a lens looking for patterns - where such patterns may not in fact exist. Unless you were running a test among multiple people to see if it starting lagging every time your experiences have no standards or control to be compared to. And even that might not be worth anything without server data, given how much of GSF actually runs client side - and it thus prone to huge perception errors.

 

The problem with your assumption is that some program running on the target's computer would have to know it had entered someone's firing arc. That information would have to come from the server. Information the server probably does not have. There's only so much data the server can handle with so much information coming in, so a lot of things have to be handled client side. If ships had to send data every time another ship entered their firing arc with exact coordinate locations, we would probably need a much beefier server to handle things. We can already see even on non-lagging opponents and missile locks that the server often makes a lot of shortcuts when determining range to target and almost always judges in favor of the safety of the target.

 

You're entitled to your opinion, but that doesn't necessarily make it right. If someone is lagging like this and still has very poor performance it's probably just lag. If they were really that bad of a pilot, it's unlikely they'd take the time to use a highly specialized lag generator program like that in the first place - it would have to be a highly specialized piece of work and tailored just for GSF to be able to imitate the kind of behavior you were observing.

[Danalon]

At every teleport the target faces another direction abruptly.

 

Server and other client know what weapon i have build in and the direction I'm facing. Probably the other client knows what upgrades I have built in. Enough to calculate where my firing arc starts.

 

Edit: Lag doesn't give you the ability to move at boost-speed indefinitely.

 

I'll try to get a video of what exactly I mean. Don't wait for it, by now it have only been 3 people using that hack in around thousand games.

Edited July 18, 2014 by Danalon

[Zoom_VI]

Server and other client know what weapon i have build in and the direction I'm facing. Probably the other client knows what upgrades I have built in. Enough to calculate where my firing arc starts.

 

I think you are misunderstanding how the server handles abilities. The server holds all of the cards not you nor your opponents client.

 

Here is a post I wrote awhile ago in a thread about lag switching in ground PvP, we can assume that abilities in GSF are handled in a similar manner to abilities in the ground game. (I'm too lazy to rewrite it in a GSF version)

 

 

I think you and I are watching the same thing but seeing two different things.

 

You see a sorc that is pulled, but then reappears at original position. The conclusion you drew from that was that the sorcs was successfully pulled but then did something to cause him to teleport back.

 

I don't see that.

 

When I watch it, I see the same thing you do, however I concluded that because the sorc post teleport is in the identical position with identical orientation, that the sorc never was pulled, and that if we had a video from the sorc or a 3rd viewer we wouldn't see the sorc being pulled and wouldn't even see the harpoon being fired.

 

You see you hit a ability, Your client then decides baised on the information available to the client at that instant whether you can actually use that ability. If your client thinks you can your client then activates the animation, and at the same time the client sends a message to the server saying you want to use that ability. The server then decides biased on its data as to if you can do that, if it decides you can it sends a "you're fine" message back to your client while at the same time sending a message to the other player's clients that you used that ability.

 

99% of the time the server and client agree. And in the rare occasions they do not agree the server corrects the client more or less instantly and all the affected player might get is the dreaded ability misfire. However under high lag there could be a humanly perceivable delay between the client starting the animation and the server correcting the client. This could presumably cause what we see in the video, where the animation was played but then the sorc was returned to where he was.

 

Now I'm not saying hacks don't exist, the exploits of the season 1 yoloqueue troll prove that, however you can only cry hack when every other possible explanation is exhausted. I have been playing since launch and in all my experience I have only had one case that couldn't be explained, and that was a year and a half ago. I don't see a hack here and I am absolutely certain that people are not lag-switching or whatnot as much as you and others in this thread seem to believe.

 

 

Edited July 18, 2014 by Zoom_VI

[Ryuku-sama]

Edit: Lag doesn't give you the ability to move at boost-speed indefinitely.

 

Yes it does.

[admpellaeon]

Can we get a server lag meter in the GSF UI please? As someone with a very poor internet connection (max 120 kb/sec) I'd be nice to know if and how much I'm lagging in a match to determine if I should leave it to avoid weird movement like that.