This is called “Dusting” and it’s caused by the issues with the frostbite engine, servers, connection between you the server and the other player. This issue of ‘dusting’ happens more often with players from other contries who join a server from quick matches and because either there servers are full, skill, or other reasonings is why they join. I notice that when I join from the U.S. to say a U.K. server I notice that I tend to have a slight advantage because of the slight lag, and connection because the server is trying to balance my lag with other players, which the lag also effects me negatively as well but the shots that should hit (typically from explosions) do not connect even tho that I know I should be at least hit also note that I didn’t throw down any med/ammo bags to take the damage for me. This issue has never been fixed or probably never fully looked into by EA or DICE, because of the lack of details and the volumes of other complaints by the community. Also for those who look at my KDR I play mainly on U.S. servers because I like a good challenge, and for those ‘wise guys’ that think that they are going to get some cheap-ohs in to boost their KDR, the ‘dusting’ happens both ways so it will only save you from being killed maybe 3 or 4 times a match, unless you do it alot or have some actual skill in the game this won’t work in your favor to much plus ‘dusting’ happens just as much for you as much as the other players in the server, so you’re going to be spending more rounds than normal and it will decrease your accuracy because the game thinks you missed when ever you hit on your screen. Nice try tho.
As for the second comment, exactly my point. Many people have cappy internet, and many can be your next door neighbor. It’s sad that less than 80% in the US have what’s defined as a broadband connection and if you looked at a US map that shows areas that have wIreland speeds of excess of 3Mbps you would be embarrassed. The reality is that almost a third of the country only has one provider which means you are stuck with what they give you and that is not fair. So many accuse OOR and say ping lock, yet what do you do with the +30% that are in region and have poor setups or poor internet?
For the hops, again not too much in a person’s control, it all depends on the ISP how they update their tables to find the optimum route as well as how much they rely on their trunk to transfer data. The company I used to work for only went outside of its trunk when it could no longer go through its own network, regardless if there was a faster or more stable route. For example there was an issue at the node up in Sacramento, instead of updating the table and using an other ISPs line it would force it still through their network. You can image the uproar and the number of calls that came in when that happened. This is why there are websites that track these and show them on a map, so if you have issues you have the truth before the ISP gives you the run around.
@PiercingGardian the dusting also happened in BF4 because only one FHT value was associated to vehicles and infantry so the hit box always lagged. But according to Floptrain, coding is never an issue, it’s always the laggy players.
Thanks for the clarification—that’s what I thought. Yes, and this really sucks. I can hound my ISP to provide optimization and that can help at times—this cleared up a spade of packet loss I was experiencing on my network a few months back—but it’s all in their control for the most part and sometimes older problems reappear and I have to have a go at them again! I think the basic conclusion of this entire thread is: it’s complicated. What’s amazing, though, is that we have @mischkag talking us through the complications, helping to educate, answer questions, and working with us to fix it. I for one find that pretty huge, especially when I’ve had some pretty bad experiences with other DICE games in the past and I’m getting quickly burned out on BF1 already.
Yes. It is complicated. It’s great to get responses about the issues. I’m not having a go at anyone here but we have been getting responses for years now from devs and others, including Chris @ battlenonsense, with actual data, when it comes to BF. Then, there have been technical posts regarding ISP’s by quite a few people on these forums, loaded with information. Same goes for “unofficial” language in regards to TCR / TRC requirements etc. Throw in some corporate “red tape”, NDA’s, and greed, there’s plenty of that to go around these days in the real world…so yes, it’s a complicated solution, but the information is out there, with data to back it up.
Fix the issues like hitboxes, coding, memory leaks, etc. and stop blaming other player’s connections. Maybe DICE should add a reaction test option in the game. That way people can see how fast they really are compared to how fast they think they are.
What’s the deal with players skating around in the crouch position?
Have seen this in the kill cam of “questionable” kills since BF3 and now I’m beginning to see it more and more often in this game.
E.g.; Hits don’t register on enemy player despite clearly being on target, enemy player turns and “insta-kills” me (hits are received in a cluster, faster than any weapon can shoot, feeling like a ohk at 100% health by a weapon that can’t have ohk’ed in the given circumstance), kill cam shows enemy player floating around the map in crouch position.
This varies from place to place. For example. My internet is supplied by BT who also happen to own all the UK infrastructure. (Except for the old AT&T cable network which is owned by Virgin.) They have networks, the old phone network that is used for ADSL and the new fibre network. The old adsl network is leased out to other internet suppliers through LLU and BT provide fibre themselves. So you could be in the position where your internet comes directly from the company that owns the network or through a third party. Once it comes time to leave the UK your data is routed out of the BT network and over onto transatlantic lines that are owned by Level 3, once it gets to the US it will be handed over to whoever the local infrastructure owners are there and routed accordingly.
So the likely hood of having your data handled by only one company are very slim I would imagine it would be the same even going from state to state in the US and it will really depend on how well this companies provision for traffic levels and congestion as well as overall network maintenance as to how well your internet will perform.
Basically what I am trying to say is there is no way your SIP can guarantee you a good connection over any real distance even if they own and operate the network which is isually not the case, at some point it will hop over to a different company and then it’s mostly out of their control to do anything.
We are kind of lucky in the UK that one company owns the majority of the infrastructure and you can get internet directly from them. Also their fibre coverage has pretty good penetration. My internet currently runs over about 20 meters of copper to the local fibre box which is just over the road.
Previously when we had ADSL it was about 5 miles of copper to the local phone exchange and the internet was terrible.
Great point. And any hops along the way that block ping data can also complicate matters too in terms of evaluation of your network’s route to the server. As to the infrastructure here, I’m not sure— @VBALL_MVP would know a lot more about that (I’m pretty ignorant on this). Definitely worth looking into. Thanks for the response.
Thanks for the compliment. I am no longer in that business but talking to old mates not much has changed in terms of ISPs practices. I’ll agree with floptrain that you shouldn’t need to be an expert, but unfortunately as technology advances and becomes more available, the more complicated it becomes. If you don’t believe me, go look at the first TVs, or more in our timeline, gaming consoles; we have gone to 1 button to 2 to 6 to whatever the PS4 has now (I counted 11).
@stuwooster is right, the will eventually get out of a carrier, they try to do this as late as possible to avoid charges. And of course going over the Atlantic you are most likely going to switch carriers like through Level3, but there are others out there owned by other telecommunications (I believe vodophone owns one). I remember one showing latency from London to New York at under 35ms (very impressive). Of course this is one hop, but still illustrates what data can be transferred at.
Interesting read would be Level 3 vs. Comcast, this will give a glimpse of the shady work of ISPs.
@stuwooster: You would need to store some sort of connection quality history to each and every server center you have connected to for each player. It is in fact getting evaluated, but wont be done for BF1.
I am not sure the sample size is big enough to do jitter analysis on demand whenever you ping a server for the server browser.
To do it in game via a warning would potentially be an option. I am just personally a bit reluctant to do that as i am not entirely sure what the correct metric here is.You have to make sure to not have stalls to disturb the picture nor server spikes. Also if you choose it to aggressive, lots of players will complain, if u choose it too loose, it wont be effective.
Your breakdown of the connection between UK and US East is exactly what i am talking about. Thats why a simplification of region locks aint that simple. Ping caps seems more useful and also perhaps some sort of jitter evaluation. The good thing with ping is that you can evaluate these before joining a server, the jitter requires some data accumulation and if we kick in game, we probably never have full games at the end
@denjoga: Well i agree that most servers should be locked. But as some of you rightfully have stated, the jitter in the ping is in fact so much more important to the lag compensation than the ping itself. A stable 100ms ping will only result in slightly delayed damage application on other players and the player will appear to your game as any other low pinger. So ping is the most simple metric you can classify connections by, but i would personnally really like to have the option to disconnect players with high jitter.
There are shortcomings with regards to hit detection and netcode in the game you currently have in your hands. I fixed a lot of these issues. Not all bugs, some just false assumptions. Although the game was optimized for low ping connections where the lag compensation was done very aggressively to not waste precious ms, but on the flip side very conservatively for poor connections. The first results in LAN alike gameplay if ALL have low ping, the latter in a smooth gameplay for poor connections. As most of you truly care about their stable and low ping connections, i wanted to make sure we do the best to value these. Unfortunately the aggressive nature of this made high jitter connections rubberband on your screen. Yes it could have been solved by simply locking the ping or region, but it is not a fast process as stated some time ago.
So it is a balancing act which i now clearly balance towards the low ping side among some buffering mechanisms. There will be server side hit detection for 3 digit pings which will keep the game playable, but will also be much more challenging for those. There should not be any benefit of joining explicitly on OOR servers. Also some matchmaking bugs have been fixed with regards to falsely reported pings.
It is easy to state that netcode or the entire frostbite engine is poorly coded. I think BF1 is by far the best BF we have released in that regard. Stability was extremely important. We clearly underestimated the amount and extent of poor internet connectiuons playing on our servers. Here at Dice LA we have a huge emphasis on listening to our players on the forum, CTE slack channel and reddit.
Next week you can likely play the XP1 maps on CTE PC (consoles likely to come next month) which will contain the bulk of netcode fixes (minus server side hit detection and some more high ping treatments, there are for the spring patch scheduled). As some of you stated correctly that CTE is not the best basis for netcode tests, i suggest it is still worth giving it a shot. Even for low pings there are improvements.
That is interesting to know. Something for the next Battlefield?
Is that something that could be done cumulatively? Whereby on first getting the game everyone has access to open servers, then over time as connection quality data is collected new servers would appear for those with better connection quality, as long as a reasonably consistent connection was maintained over games these servers would remain available but if quality started to drop then those servers would just disappear from the browser list, not necessarily kicking people mid game.
I would think any kind of restriction would have to be fairly transparent as i would guess the majority of players have no idea on things like jitter and packet loss, hence what i said above in that rather than getting kicked or receiving warnings, these players just never see the better quality servers, ignorance is bliss How that would work for people trying to join friends i dont know, maybe just a message that says something online the lines incompatible connection quality, please join X / Y server to play with friends?
Out of interest, how many players on a 64p server would it take to make things wonky, is there a threshold whereby the server can tolerate say up to 10 players or a certain range. Or can one person with a really bad connection make everything go ¯_(ツ)_/¯ up for the whole server?
You make some good suggestions, but it also requires a persistent logic to store this information. Thats what I hope we can get to for the next game. I dont really wanna consistently ping all servers just to find out which ones i may have jitter to. Hiding a server from you where you had a poor game session to this time around wont do much good as you will stay on the server as long as you enjoy it.
As mentioned before, the impact of packet loss or a jittery connection is barely measurable on the server. But even one player can make the experience really poor for everyone as he is hard to hit, rubberbands thru the world and applies any game even very late to the recipients (damage etc).
has anyone’s hit detection problem gotten better or worse post patch for me at least it seems I get less single frame catch-up deaths but still feel like I have less damage output than the enemy
I understand that the clients don’t match up but it’s most noticeable when I use lmgs it takes me more than 6 bullets dead center to kill and I’ve had times where my he rounds with the tank land directly on someone’s foot only to see them running out of the debris and at times feels like my opponents do more damage I’ve gotten killed by a hellriegel with two shots to the stomach full health
I’ve always (since BF3) felt at times (more often than not) that it takes me twice as many bullets to kill as to be killed.
I assume it’s just another facet of the whole latency compensation thing.
Crazy thing is I never once had a problem with 3 but once bf4 came out it started at least for me funny thing is I remember when I played the beta it was perfect http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/CJA191/video/27162878
At this point I wanted to take my Xbox and smash it through my tv
Nice try tho.
