[2022] Skill Issue Indeed (Alt-Tab; Netcode Problem)

Wow, thanks for reporting this. We're currently investigating and trying to understand the general issues everyone's been feeling around inconsistency in game feel from game to game.

Alt-tab as a trigger is something that jogs a few gears in our brains in potential causes, including a couple that we were already going to investigate, but helps in attributing a direct cause, and is a potential explanation for how netcode feel can just simply vary game to game. We're still going to investigate other potential causes, but this has me a bit more hopeful in that we're going to be able to find the crux of the issue and address it more quickly, now that we have a way to potentially trigger it.

We're getting our QA to get some reps on this and help us understand what's going on with netcode when someone alt tabs, and were already getting diagnostics for the parts of the system we think are going wrong. We don't have anything concrete to share yet, but we are definitely taking a close look - after all, this is one of the most important things for the game.

I believe we were using an incorrect legacy call for Windowed Fullscreen that introduced input latency, and I'm not exactly sure if we've addressed it or not, but it is something we will be fixing at some point.

Our servers are trying to run at 128-tick (and we have some sub-systems that are forced to run at 128-tick, like physics and movement, no matter what the actual tick rate of the server is). However, if we're unoptimized or have issues, we can't force 128 tick if we hitched and dropped lower to a lower tickrate.

Hopefully this isn't fluctuating significantly in mid-round. We're aware of end-of-round and buy phase fluctuations and we're not too worried about them right now, since there's no combat.

I really hope so too! We're super concerned with this, and finally having a way to potentially find fixes for this problem is really exciting to me. I would love to finally fix this chapter of "weird netcode."