[2020] It really does look like Riot messed something up with hitboxes in 0.50 ...

Heya! I work on the team that's responsible for hitreg, and spent a ton of time digging into this stuff this patch (I care a lot about hitreg- that sh*t's important).

We can't confirm my theory is 100% correct yet (working on validating it still) but there's two things I believe are happening here.

1.) Tracers fired while inaccurate from movement are not synced to the server like they are when you're standing still or from firing error (those two are synced, so the tracers you see on your screen are what's happening on the server). This means that when you have movement inaccuracy, you may see tracers pass through an enemy and not deal damage. The changes we put in increase the time it takes to become accurate from running and we increased movement inaccuracy while walking, which means it's likely people are movement inaccurate more often. I know I am, re-learning the muscle memory timings for stop-and-shoot is hard.

2.) The spark hit impacts aren't helping for players that are used to the blood hit impacts. They're brighter, obscure the target more, and don't differentiate as well from head and body shots as blood does currently. They're also the same color as the tracers, and it can be hard to see where the tracer is going through the spark impact.

We'll be keeping a close eye on this. There may still be a hitreg problem hiding in there somewhere.

Thanks for all the reports and videos- those help us narrow down the root cause and help direct testing efforts. Appreciate ya'll.

Summary:

Shots 1-5: Clearly missed.

Edit: Thanks everyone for all the links and videos. They were incredibly helpful. While the moving and shooting theory debunked some of the issues, there were some cases where players were standing still and shots appeared to be not registering. I did some investigation into this- and there is a bug. After respawning through resurrect or at the start of a new round, you trigger the bug. The bug is, the lower your FPS, the more enemy hitboxes can become desynced while they move (meaning your shot may not hit a moving enemy, even if your cursor is over them). We're working on a fix. Thanks again. We're also still looking into the movement inaccuracy tracers!

I'm really bad about Discord pm's- I'll try to check them more often (I'm sure other there are probably other messages in there I've missed by now). Easiest way to reach me is through DM on reddit or Twitter (mostly twitter tbh).

As for the Bucky bug, I would love to see the clip! If you're right clicking at point-blank range, you should only deal minor damage (the shell has to go a minimum set distance before exploding into the shotgun blast, like Roadhog's. But if it's dealing no damage at all that's something I'm not currently aware of!

Videos of bug reports are the best. Thank you for recording your bugs, once again recordings are hugely helpful to the team.

Agreed!

Thanks for the link! Looking into this as well.

We're still digging to fully understand what's happening. I can't confirm that we'll have a fix by next patch once we confirm where the bug(s) are, but we're trying!

Really appreciate that, thank you :)

If only all the FPS games I loved had perfect hitreg!

Thank you, I very much appreciate the kind words :)

I can talk with some folks about it, yeah. As I understand it it's a competitive advantage question- do we allow a setting that helps alleviate the 'headache' problem if that setting is a must for competitive play? I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that's my simple understanding of the problem in adding that setting for now

Edit: Don't worry about shooting stuff my way that's not out of my domain- my domain is rather broad (most of the underlying game tech is done by my team, stuff like movement, HUD, UI, Hitreg, Wall Pen, etc etc). If it's something I don't have knowledge about I can direct you to the right folks to talk to

I'm not sure yet, I imagine more color options is not off the table.

The bug affects players at all FPS ranges, but scales in severity the lower you go. At 30-15 FPS it gets pretty bad- not hugely bad but bad enough that the shots (as seen in your video) would miss a moving target if you were lined up directly on them. I believe that's what is going on in the video you linked here- you can see the player dips to about 70 fps while shooting- low enough for the hitreg desync to be large enough for the shots to miss.