[2020] The state of netcode

The last time any change was made that could potentially affect hit registration was about 2 weeks ago, and this was announced. We are not doing any kind of unannounced A/B testing on the regular as you suspect. Every time netcode or anything related to netcode has been changed, it has been reported in the patch notes. The person who pointed me to this thread asked me if maybe we do secret A/B testing to remove bias. Just to be clear, we don't, and I don't think we'd ever do that with netcode. If we wanted to do that kind of blind testing with more people than we usually test with, we'd put together a user group. We are not gonna be doing those kind of unannounced changes, especially, when tournaments are happening.

Let's focus on "but the reg seems random as hell". We do test hitreg quite a bit, analysing the data to make sure everything is working as expected. We also record video from our tests, note the failed shots that could potentially have actually been hits, then we look frame by frame on those shots to make sure things are working correctly, etc. We do this testing with a variety of network conditions, both natural (by playing in remote servers) or synthetic, by adding artificial latency. Also, in the past when any streamer has had what seems like a registration fail on stream, a bunch of different people used to DM me that Twitch clip immediately. I haven't seen these reports in a long time. I've also asked a bunch of people who are good, whom I use as subjective markers, for their take on your report, and none of them feel reg is broken atm. I've reminded everyone that reports to me to send me any suspicious clip they see. There's also the fact that now we have tournaments happening and if some obvious hitreg issue happens in the middle of the tournament, people will notify me quickly, and this hasn't happened lately (at least nobody has shown me such a clip and it would be weird if it happened and nobody did).

Now, this is not to say there isn't a problem, I'm sure there's something going on or three of you in this thread wouldn't be giving me this feedback. That whole paragraph is just to hopefully get across the point that I'm really going to need a video clip in order to address whatever you are experiencing and for us to make some progress. Also: /u/tofazzz /u/doppz1 , it seems you are reporting similar issues, do any of you have any clips? Specifically hit registration issues? Maybe Shadowplay or ReLive can help you make that process easier as ArneTreholt said? (By the way, if anyone has a clip where they feel a shot should have landed but are unsure about posting it because they don't want to have a bunch of people telling them that they actually failed the shot, which I understand can be a bit frustrating, you can DM me the clip on discord.)

/u/nkh85 : Replays are coming soon, and indeed, it will help with this kind of thing, although in most cases, video recorded on the PoV of the player will always be good. Replays will help us contextualize and diagnose what's going on but video will always be preferred as a starting point.

Also if you provide any clips, please let me know in what server location were you playing at the time, what's your usual ping, and at what time of day you usually play (this may seem weird but some routing issues happen at certain times of the day).

UPDATE: A reminder for people coming into this from a Quake background, keep in mind the Keel model has a significant amount of margin to the sides where the hit will land even though there's no geometry there that eggbots lack at the height of their maximum visual radii. In fact the situation is somewhat reversed in DBT in a sense because of the shoot-through arms, so do keep that in mind when you judge if lateral shots should have landed.

Thanks, I'm going to focus on hitscan registration for now, and you have only provided a clip of that. In that pncr clip where you think it's going through this is where you actually shot: https://imgur.com/a/9rKcS0w

You can tell if you play it frame by frame because the pncr fire animation nudges the pncr upwards a little bit when the attack is triggered. Because you are moving the mouse to the right and the particle effect is delayed one frame this gives the impression you hit, but you didn't. If this is just about the particle effect being delayed one frame it may explain why some people feel registration is bad even though we have pros consistently hitting 10% more than they hit in QC. I'll check why it's delayed (it's something we were aware of, because when we analyse our clips we look for that pncr nudge and not the PFX). Furthermore, if the delay is frame-based and not time-based it would make the discrepancy feel larger for people with lower fps, also potentially explaining why some people give way different feedback. Anyways, I'll try to address this one thing first, thanks for the clips, we'll go through the rest.

That may be unpractical because of the Eggbot dimensions right now. But also, good players are already hitting 70%, things may get a bit out of hand if we keep making it easier. (As an anecdote, somebody did a test setting the metrics to be more like QL and they were hitting 80%, about 25% more of what this person hits in QL.) But in any case, we have identified an issue (see my reply to Ardi46) that may be affecting people's impressions. The PNCR effect is delayed by what seems to be at least one frame, this may lead people watching videos to read some things as a hit that are not. So we are going to first get this issue out of the way and see if the feedback from these players improve, no need to consider anything drastic just yet.

Fix is up in 412.