Forums » Suggestions

when lagged you should be invulnerable

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Feb 23, 2005 ananzi link
rather than being wasted by bots.

im telling u people when ships cost 100,000 each there will be many unhappy campers who die just because of some net hiccup and nothing of their own piloting fault.

i used to play an MMO flightsim where everyone was on modems, lag was terrible but they dealt with it by having u invulnerable when lagged.

right now we are invulnerable at wormholes, its not that big a difference.

the only problem is cheaters who unplug their cable or whatever to create artificial lag and hence artificial invulnerability. but somehow that doesnt seem like much of a problem to me. they would have to be pretty quick on the draw to actually use that stupid trick in combat... and after they 'come out of lag' .. what then? they cant very well run away from the attacker any better than before. if they did it could be reported and they could be penalized by the referees.

compared with the hundreds of thousands of credits i have lost to being killed by bots after i lagged for 1500 milliseconds... (my botting ship cost 30,000 btw) i dont care about a few idiots cheating like this. they will get blown up more often than not anyways.

i was even on a ctc battle recently where the attacker lagged for about 1-2 seconds and got blown away by the bots and me. it was terrible. i can imagine saturday night down to the wire and this happens to someone and the whole CTC battle is thrown off because of one silly net hiccup.

Feb 23, 2005 johnhawl218 link
I like it, can it be done easily enough that the devs will do it soon is the real question.
Feb 23, 2005 Celkan link
We used to have this "feature."
People complained that people were cheating.
It (the "feature") was removed.

[Rudeness removed. I'm getting tired of this. Forum Mod]
Feb 23, 2005 KixKizzle link
No john that's not the real question. This feature will not be put back into this game. It would mess up the circle of life too much.

/givemoney Devs 2c
Feb 23, 2005 johnhawl218 link
@Kix are for Kizzle

You mean the cycle of death don't you? =)

Everyone is so bent on standing there ground and dieing. And lag seems to help that even more now. But as was discussed at length ingame, it's probably for the best that it's not added.
Feb 23, 2005 Tyrdium link
[stamp of disapproval]

ananzi, hint: You'll be taken more seriously if you start using decent spelling, capitalization, and grammar, and don't post about every tiny thing that irks you and (usually) only you.
Feb 23, 2005 Starfisher link
How does it know you are lagging?

If it stops receiving packets for more than a second? A half second? Where's the cut off?

The problem with a lag hiccup is that when your packets come back to the server, it tries to compensate. Which means you'd be invulnerable and shooting, basically, which would be an exploit.

And please, drop this Cap ship stuff. If you lag out in a capital ship for 1.5s, that means you will continue on your present heading for 1.5s at whatever speed you were moving. When you're in an agile fighter, 1.5s is a lot of time to manuever. When you're in a massive cap ship, that's not enough to make a difference. If you die in a 1.5s lag hiccup, you were going to die anyway.
Feb 23, 2005 Martin.mac.au link
Sounds great.

Osiris-X, Infinite Skillz and I would be invulnerable.
Feb 23, 2005 CrippledPidgeon link
Great! I could play with Azureus sucking all but the tiniest tidbit of my bandwidth, and I'd NEVER DIE!

I remember when there was invulnerability for people who were lagging. Some dude in a Rag would fly up, missile you, and you'd pound and pound and pound and pound and pound and pound and pound and pound and pound and pound and pound, and realize that you weren't doing any damage.
Feb 23, 2005 Hoax link
You could also lag yourself out and fly through peoples ships. Unlag and suddenly you rocket through them, they blow up and you carry on. I actually had a lag exploit fight with more than one person during alpha (both of us trying to lag ram or shoot each other) it was SILLY.

Anyway I think it's just too darn easy to abuse. But, what if the invulnerableness was only against bots? That might not be so bad.
Feb 23, 2005 tramshed link
aye, much too easy to abuse
Feb 23, 2005 Infinite_Skillz link
Heh, there are few players that can speak with such authority on this matter as us antipodeans (and others who are geographically dispersed). So I thought I would lend my vast experiences with lag to this discussion :D.

As fas as I see it, having a large ping (250-500) is a disadvantage for both players involved in PvP, rather than just for the laggy player. Both ships will skip about, and both will experience the vaguaries of laggy combat -- Shots will hit but cause no damage for the attacker (ie. lagger is invulnerable?), and the lagger will receive damage without ever seeing the shot fired.

What is more concerning are longer lag spikes. These are incredibly frustrating, either during PvP or while botting as your ship will simply float, and make an incredibly easy target. But Starfisher is right, where should the cut off be to protect players experiencing this? 2 seconds? This might help against very bizarre incidents such as flying through a hostile sector, receiving no damage, but then suddenly exploding halfway throught the next sector load, but will otherwise make gameplay a bit too strange as CP and Hoax pointed out.

Mainly the timeout trigger needs to be reduced. A lot! Regardless of how it could be exploited, flying around for a whole sixty seconds after your modem hangs up, wondering what the hell is going on (why you cant dock, warp, attack etc), is way too long! A much smaller timeout should be enough to disconnect the client, and remove your ship from the sector.

Otherwise I dont think there is much benefit to (re-?) adopting invulnerability and all the craziness it entails. However maybe there should be some other changes to help 'laggy' players get more involved in the game.

One of my main problems with a slow connection is the incredibly slow load times. I have to warp sectors long before another player to have any chance of seeing them in the next sector, and I can never ever make the trade mission time bonuses due to the extremely slow travel times. Maybe after a decided 'time' a slow loading player's battery could start recharging during the load, so that a long load would leave you with a full battery as you warped in? This would even things out a bit more, and allow modem players to travel at a more respectable pace, and be more involved in CtC.

As for the lag-sploding? Meh, im almost used to it! >_<
Feb 23, 2005 Starfisher link
The only problem with the quick cut out is people disconnecting to avoid death. Believe it or not, this used to be quite a problem. The /logoff command allowed you to disappear in ten seconds, which you can easily get when going through a wormhole (I forget how long the invulnerability lasts, but if you /logoff just as you start going through the WH and the other guy comes out anywhere but right on top of you, you would be able to log out without getting killed).

I feel bad for you unlucky folks that have to suffer through 250+ pings, but there's not very much that can be done. May I suggest moving to the coast nearest the US and hijacking the undersea cable?
Feb 23, 2005 Tyrdium link
Ack, the exploiting was even worse before there was a logoff timer... Didn't feel like dying? Esc -> Log Off. Ya.
Feb 23, 2005 ananzi link
sorry this is simply a matter of will. it is entirely possible to improve the situation from its present sorry state.

yeah ok, no response after 0.5 seconds that counts as a lag. then you go invulnerable. and furthermore, make all of your missiles and all of your shots and your ship do 0 damage while you are lagged. after you reconnect, you are invulnerable for 0.5 more seconds, and all your weapons are unfirable for 1 second... and all of your fired missiles/mines/etc ... again... do no damage and your shots dont either.

but most of all if u think someone else is cheating, report it to a guide... and there will be an 'instant replay' device added to the game, will be like a little video playback unit for guides so they can make a call. furthermore 'lag history' will be kept on each player, and suspicious patterns will be watched closely. if someone is lagging only when they are in sedina b8 at 5% health, but every other sector never lags, then they are probably a cheater.

-----

and as for 100,000c ships, thats not a cap ship, thats a 'big ship' with a lot of fancy doohickeys put on it. who knows what we will get in the future. think of the children.
Feb 23, 2005 Tyrdium link
That has the potential to create significant amounts of server-side (and possibly client-side?) overhead, not to mention the programming required for it.
Feb 23, 2005 Starfisher link
Um, your invulnerability/weapon unfirability ideas are impossible and... well ill-thought out, to put it lightly.

Making people invulnerable for split seconds, turning off their weapon shots, then making them unable to fire... you think losing a ship would be frustrating - how about not being able to fight with said ship because everytime you try you're arbitrarily invincible?

Instant replay?! Record everything that goes on? There is a reporting device, I'm sure, but addind comprehensive coverage of everything that happens in the game would ADD lag, and ruin EVERYONE'S experience.

And finally, try EvE. That game is laggy as hell, and ships take far more time and money to acquire. FAR more. I lost three ships to lag in the free trial period of 14 days, whereas here I have an average of one a month. I can only imagine what it would be like for people on lesser connection (I'm at a college that has an obscene amount of unrestricted bandwidth). That game seems to be going strong despite lag related deaths... I think they topped ten thousand people online not to long ago.

Basically, lag is a part of the internet. It always will be, and if the myriad of threads and complaints you've posted are any indication, you are unable to accept this basic tenant of internet reality. Everyone else can shrug it off. Out of curiosity, have you ever played another online game before?
Feb 24, 2005 Solra Bizna link
Keep in mind, the server does NOT calculate damage on you DURING a lag spike, it's AFTER your lag spike that it calculates it, and it bases it [partially] on your LOCAL positions during the spike. The reason people are so easily damaged by lag spikes is they just move in a straight line as soon as they realize they're lagging, so the volley of shots the TyCorp fired at them all hits.
-:sigma.SB
Feb 24, 2005 Renegade ++RIP++ link
in stead of invulnerable get the refund if you get blasted to smittereens?

althouh will be exploitable as well.

anyway I don't mind either way, if I die I die, if not then not.

cheers
Feb 24, 2005 tramshed link
Any type of invulnerbility is too easily exploitable, someone fires at you for instance, unplug your line, fly to the wormhole, plug it back in, warp. Or, hey I dont wanna die! *unplug.* Or, hey ill unplug till he thinks im not comin back, plug back in, get off a few cheap shots and unplug real fast again. The list of ways you could cause massive annoyances with this is huge.