devtrackers.gg
Edit: I've now been told many, many times that some people are also experiencing issues grabbing tails as well as having them grabbed from a distance. I'm just describing my experience and hypothesising. Your experience might be different and I accept that.
I don't claim to know, but I assume this was a trade off that the developers made to deal with latency. Take the following with a huge grain of salt:
When you're grabbing the tail, it's based on the local state of your game - i.e. if it looks like you grabbed the tail, you grabbed the tail. That makes the game playable. It would be impossibly frustrating otherwise.
The issue is that, because of latency, everyone sees everyone else slightly behind their actual position. In effect that means when you're chasing, you appear closer than you actually are, but because the grab is based on your local game state, you can get the tail. When you're being chased, the reverse is true - you seem further away from the pursuing players than you actually are.
This results in the weird imbalance where grabbing the tail feels right, but having it grabbed feels very off.
If anyone with experience of game networking code wants to chime in, I'd love to know if I'm on the right lines.
This is very accurate. We're looking into it but there's no quick fix unfortunately!
Is it possible that physics are desyncing amongst clients? (Exacerbating the latency issue)
I’ve played quite a few tail games with someone in the same room and we get the same grab issues
You wouldn’t happen to know the tickrate for physics interactions, would you ;)
I can't speak to the specifics but even if you're in the same room that interaction has to go via the server so you're likely to see latency there still.