Animation canceling causes all delays to be ignored when attacks are replicated to remote clients

ChairGraveyard · May 2017

First off, a disclaimer: This post is intended for ZOS and their network engineers. Those who don't know what "replication" or "remote client" means should probably just observe. I won't really be replying to anyone who doesn't demonstrate enough knowledge of networking games to discuss this properly.

Animation cancelling exists and ZOS refuses to remove or fix it - FINE.

However, it is completely and utterly broken for remote clients, because the minimum possible animation delays *with* anim-cancelling are NOT being replicated properly, resulting in multiple skills landing instantly on remote players, despite the local player seeing those delays on their own client.

Needless to say this is incredibly broken and allows macro users to cheat in an extremely broken way.

The minimum time between skills *must* be replicated across the network properly, and it is not currently at all.

Ajintse · May 2017

Woah, I think I just made a post which is almost the same what you just described here. But have no clue if this is replication or remote client issue. But, i'd like to have this investigated by ZOS.

Catnight · May 2017

This reminds me more of a certain form of lag. The "i-store-all-informations-and-release-them-in-5-times-speed-after" kind of lag. You sure checked the packet loss to the server already?

ChairGraveyard · May 2017

Catnight wrote: »

This reminds me more of a certain form of lag. The "i-store-all-informations-and-release-them-in-5-times-speed-after" kind of lag. You sure checked the packet loss to the server already?

Aye, I had 70ms ping to the server and no significant packet loss. I've seen this happen a bunch of times, and similar reports as @Ekstak21 mentions.

Kali_Despoine · May 2017

I've seen this but just chalked it up to server response lag and packet loss.
Plus being on a PS4 doesn't help.
Though I don't see it as often or not at all in other MMO type games I play/played.

Carpe-Veritatem · May 2017

This has been going on for as long as the game's been around. People without any lag get hit with 5 abilities at once and are basically one shotted. The common refrain of "Maybe you were just lagging and it seemed like they hit all at once..." just doesn't cut it. Macro users have such HUGE advantages that it's obscene. I admit it may be one of the most difficult issues for ZOS to solve, but it's so disrupting in PvP that it really should be stopped.

Uncle_Sweetshare · May 2017

I've also seen this, hopefully they manage to figure out how to fix it. The big issue is that it could be any number of things, although the simplest solution would seem to add an animation check on remote clients, which would prevent abilities from hitting faster than the animation cooldown would allow.

tommalmm · May 2017

It's hard to resolve this issue properly, without risking a total desync or increased delays in fights with poeple that have occasional lag spikes (mostly because of their router misconfiguration without any regard to qos, less likely to an ISP overbooking and ping going haywire during peak times). When you correctly replicate the timings, one lag spike means you're lagging till the fight ends or even relog. Some simple workaround might alleviate that, though (like making sure attacks are not being replicated faster that respective cooldowns, but then you would either get a move-attack desync or another lag accumulation issue).

IMO, it can't be fixed easily without making things a lot worse in the process.