Vice Underdogs

Archive => Dueling Championships - Season 4 => Season 4 => Vice City Dueling Championship => Archived Events => General Discussion, Betting, and Questions => Topic started by: Tom on July 14, 2015, 09:20:13 pm

Title: Winner forecast
Post by: Tom on July 14, 2015, 09:20:13 pm
I'm convinced that lags and glitches have a significant impact to outcome of every 1 vs 1 battle in VC:MP. I'm also convinced that lags and glitches are almost decisive things in 1 vs 1 duel format (open area without covers and shotguns as a primary weapon).
So, based on this, I'm doing the forecast: VCDC winner will be a hard-lagging glitcher.

So, according to this, IMO tournament favorites are:
[DU]Moskvish - lags hard enough to outlag the most part of VCMP players
[DZ]Noori - also a lagger, but less then Moskvish, may be better than him in glitching
[SS]anMexican - good lag coupled with strange (https://youtu.be/JnBmSpSD2bY) kind (https://youtu.be/Hwyt9eaZVYc) of skill (https://youtu.be/MU66KX9QC9E)
[SS]Daniel - good representative of lag + glitch formula
[DnA]Bryce - one of the top laggers of tournamet, but lacks of skill

All of them are lag and glitch enough to win. I'm not going to make a forecast which of them is strongest.
Group stage isn't over yet, so some details may change, but IMO hard glitching lagger will win.

You may agree with me or don't. You may discuss my forecast, post your opinion or offer your favorites.
I'm not making any bet, I just post it to share my opinion and produce some discussion.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Kelvin on July 14, 2015, 10:31:46 pm
Is this the reason you dont participate?
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: stormeus on July 14, 2015, 11:38:46 pm
You make it sound like VC:MP has a HaveGlitchersAndLaggersWinFights function, and not that the "higher skilled "players haven't realized that the fire-and-forget shotgun switching style is unreliable now.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: NewK on July 15, 2015, 03:15:56 am
Meh. Laggers have always had the advantage in VC:MP, this is not new, it's the same in SA:MP, MTA, etc... However, 0.4 doesn't seem to be very good at handling laggers in comparison to 0.3zR2. The sync is definitely better now for low pingers but when it comes to laggers, it has become insanely harder to hit them. I was thinking about this the other day, maybe we just can't have both. Maybe we just can't have a sync that works best for both low ping players and laggers. We either have a good and precise sync for low pingers or we have a different kind of sync that makes it easier to hit laggers but in comparison low ping fights won't be as precise ( I believe this was the case in 0.3zR2 ). I don't really know if this is how it works technically, but this is the impression I have.

One mistake you're making though is that you're taking VC:MP as a competitively viable game/mod. If you're going to do that you're in for a world of pain and frustration, because VC:MP will never be fair. There will always be players with higher pings and they'll always have the advantage over players with a low ping. There's nothing we can do about that. Other games solve this by grouping players of the same region together and having them play on a server on that region, but since VC:MP already has small userbase we can't afford to be splitting the userbase like that and make it even smaller.

players haven't realized that the fire-and-forget shotgun switching style is unreliable now.
I find it to be just as reliable as it was back in 0.3zR2, just not against laggers. Low ping fights work pretty much like they used to when it comes to shotgun/stubby, the sync's even better imo. But when it comes to laggers, I can barely can hit anyone >150 ping. I don't know if this is just me, I usually have 58/60 ping, but I don't think so, I've heard other low pingers complain aswell. Just the other day in LW I spawned in DT as one of those green whores and was fighting with a group against 1 guy. There was 3 of us against this 1 cop with a shotgun that just kept jumping 0.3x style. He kept doing this repeatedly while running in and out of he pharmacy. While in the middle of the fight, he had the time to stop, type !heal and jump just as a stubby shot hit him, making him lose hp but not falling. This kept happening during all the fights with him. And he wasn't having fps lagg, he wasn't warping, his movements were smooth. As I was fighthing I remember thinking that he must've had like 300 or 400 ping but when I checked the scoreboard, I noticed he only had 200 ping, which is not even that high by 0.3z standards but it really makes a big difference in 0.4.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: GangstaRas on July 15, 2015, 05:53:42 am
If I could rate Newk's post higher......couldn't agree more. Now I'm not the best player out there nor do I have the best ping (150s for Europe) but I have similar issues that Newk described. From my perspective the sync from my ping to a lower pinger seems somewhat the same although before, lets say I'm facing someone 80 and under I didn't have to lead aim for them, as it is now, even if it's 20 ping I still have to have a slight lead aim.

For high pingers, I'd say 200 and over, something's just not right. Sometimes you could have such beautiful timing, you predicted their position flawlessly, your shot came out before they settled at that position and the delay between your shot and the summated ping delay of you and your opponent seems just right for all of this to work out for you, and the shot just didn't do one thing. I mean that kind of happened in 0.3 days but its far too often now in 0.4. Is it just the sole difference of fps perhaps? no warp if they're running at 30 fps but if you're too fast @60fps your shot wont register? like a Call of Duty scenario
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: krystianoo on July 15, 2015, 08:27:20 am
[DZ]Noori.

Need not to explain.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: NewK on July 15, 2015, 09:39:54 am
For high pingers, I'd say 200 and over, something's just not right. Sometimes you could have such beautiful timing, you predicted their position flawlessly, your shot came out before they settled at that position and the delay between your shot and the summated ping delay of you and your opponent seems just right for all of this to work out for you, and the shot just didn't do one thing. I mean that kind of happened in 0.3 days but its far too often now in 0.4. Is it just the sole difference of fps perhaps? no warp if they're running at 30 fps but if you're too fast @60fps your shot wont register? like a Call of Duty scenario
Yes, this exactly. But sometimes I'm amazed by how precise the sync is, I truly am, and I notice this more and more when I'm against low pingers. I find myself not even needing to lead aim, and just have to shoot at the actual body, that by itself impressed me the most in 0.4. But it's so troll, sometimes (almost always against 200 pingers) It's just like it refuses to work just to fuck with me. Doesn't feel as consistent as 0.3zR2. 0.3zR2 sync wasn't very good overall, but it felt consistent. When it was shitty in some situation, it was always shitty, when it was good, it was always good. The Cod scenario is definitely a possibility imo. Back in Cod2 when you hit 200fps, other players would stop hearing your footsteps. This was insanely op because you could just run around and no one would hear you comming. This was also the reason why most servers limited the fps to 125 or 150.

In vcmp the scenario of: low pinger with frame limit on VS >=200 pinger with frame limiter off should be looked into. I don't know exactly what's happening or if these problems only occur in this situation, but it's like you said, something's just not right.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: aXXo on July 15, 2015, 12:37:42 pm
My theory:
0.3z registered shots when a player presses the fire button (resulted in ghost shots)
0.4 registers shots a little late, when the bullets leave your barrel.

This delay could be the reason why 0.3z sync felt better in case of shotguns.
For automatic weapons this delay does not matter, hence  0.4 sync feels far superior. Kills through M4/M60 are much more frequent in 0.4.

Another thing I noticed is, on a localhost server, my ping used to be either 30 or 60 in 0.3z. It is 0 in 0.4 servers as it should be.
That means, 0.3z added 30 or 60 to every ping, and we are used to judge playability in reference to that ping. So, if you see a player with 180 ping, assume he has 240 ping(add 60). All server's ping limiter should also be updated accordingly.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Kessu on July 15, 2015, 01:42:42 pm
Back in Cod2 when you hit 200fps, other players would stop hearing your footsteps.
Nope. The FPS limit for footsteps starting to disappear was 333 and above. At 333 FPS your steps would go silent only when using "Heavy guns" such as mp44, but when you hit say 500, all of your steps were silent (read; does not include jumping).



As for the topic itself, I do kind of agree with NewK. Laggers have become far harder to hit, especially jumping one, but that doesn't make them invicible.

As for lowping fight sync, it is godlike in 0.4  O0
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Milko on July 15, 2015, 02:46:37 pm
NewK said it all. But, as Kessu says, they're not invincible.

The winner will be Noori, unless Moskvish outgostglitches him.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: NewK on July 15, 2015, 03:43:43 pm
My theory:
0.3z registered shots when a player presses the fire button (resulted in ghost shots)
0.4 registers shots a little late, when the bullets leave your barrel.

This delay could be the reason why 0.3z sync felt better in case of shotguns.
This is an interesting theory, I believe this is it, you might be correct aXXo. This makes alot of sense to me. And it's not like 0.4 has bad shotgun sync. Like I said, the low ping fights are nearly spot on. Be it with shotguns, rifles, automatic weapons, etc....But when there's a big difference between pings (about 100/150), the player with the lowest ping will be severely handicaped. This would also explain why 200 pingers feel like they have 300/400 ping now. Because 0.4 in a effort to prevent ghost shots, registers the shots later, which is not a problem for fights between low pingers, but this delay is a real problem when fighting laggers, because a lagger's position is already delayed and on top of that 0.4 still delays your shots to prevent ghost shots, it's like adding 100 ping to their original ping, making it seem like people lagg more than they actually do. With automatic weapons it's not as important, but I can notice the delay is still there, and it becomes easier to notice the higher the ping of your enemy is.

I think this situation falls into that problem I was talking about on my first post. We probably can't have a sync that works best for both laggers and low pingers. 0.3's sync seemed to be more balanced but the result of that was ghost shots all over the place. To be honest I don't think they're capable of fixing this, although I wish they could fix it, but I don't really see how. It'd be interesting to see how this is handled if they decide to try and fix it.

Back in Cod2 when you hit 200fps, other players would stop hearing your footsteps.
Nope. The FPS limit for footsteps starting to disappear was 333 and above. At 333 FPS your steps would go silent only when using "Heavy guns" such as mp44, but when you hit say 500, all of your steps were silent (read; does not include jumping).
You're absolutely right, sorry my memory is a bit hazy, haven't played in a long time :P
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: GangstaRas on July 15, 2015, 06:27:16 pm

I think this situation falls into that problem I was talking about on my first post. We probably can't have a sync that works best for both laggers and low pingers. 0.3's sync seemed to be more balanced but the result of that was ghost shots all over the place. To be honest I don't think they're capable of fixing this, although I wish they could fix it, but I don't really see how. It'd be interesting to see how this is handled if they decide to try and fix it.


How I see one SA:MP server handle this is through the aim. Idk how they do it (maybe a reverse engineer of aimbotting, idk) but they seem to sync position of the crosshairs from a player so that even if his ping is 500+, this sync will still makes his shots register where the player intented to aim. If that was implemented in the VC:MP world, it would turn a world of wanky & glitchy moves cuz the body of the player is still lagging so what happens is that if the body is facing away from you, the gun shots are bending from muzzle and registering hitting you. Imagine that in the fast combat of VC:MP
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: stormeus on July 15, 2015, 06:33:32 pm
0.4 does not register shots as soon as they leave the barrel. Shots are registered as soon as you press your fire key. In a perfect world, this would mean that players with higher pings would just see your shots later.

However, if packets are received out of order, as they usually are at higher and higher pings, then players may not see your shots appeared because the "not firing" packet arrived too early (desync). Or, they could see you shooting when your bullets haven't left the barrel because their "not firing" packet arrived too late (ghosting).

If you look at the 0.1c source code and the 0.4 source code (or at least what I'm talking you about it), this is how weapon sync has always worked. However, I would also imagine that jumping RakNet versions and rewriting the entire core would result in some changes in how these situations end up affecting gameplay.


I think this situation falls into that problem I was talking about on my first post. We probably can't have a sync that works best for both laggers and low pingers. 0.3's sync seemed to be more balanced but the result of that was ghost shots all over the place. To be honest I don't think they're capable of fixing this, although I wish they could fix it, but I don't really see how. It'd be interesting to see how this is handled if they decide to try and fix it.


How I see one SA:MP server handle this is through the aim. Idk how they do it (maybe a reverse engineer of aimbotting, idk) but they seem to sync position of the crosshairs from a player so that even if his ping is 500+, this sync will still makes his shots register where the player intented to aim. If that was implemented in the VC:MP world, it would turn a world of wanky & glitchy moves cuz the body of the player is still lagging so what happens is that if the body is facing away from you, the gun shots are bending from muzzle and registering hitting you. Imagine that in the fast combat of VC:MP

SA:MP has experimental lag compensation. The problem with lag compensation is that yes, at higher pings, the state of the game world becomes increasingly inaccurate. If a player shoots you on their screen because they're lagging, but on your screen you just ran around a corner, it could look like you're getting shot through walls. TF2 exhibits pretty much the same problem, but it's more refined, and most players don't play on servers where they lag anyway.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Tom on July 15, 2015, 07:31:32 pm
Is this the reason you dont participate?
This is the reason I don't duel at all.
And was I supposed to participate? I'm pragmatic player who knows his strengths and weaknesses. 1 vs 1 stubby duel isn't my style.

You make it sound like VC:MP has a HaveGlitchersAndLaggersWinFights function, and not that the "higher skilled "players haven't realized that the fire-and-forget shotgun switching style is unreliable now.
Lack of skills can be compensated by lags. You can't deny it.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: koray on July 15, 2015, 08:12:44 pm
If we are talking about the lag,I was able to beat SaM.I cant compare him with anyone
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: NewK on July 15, 2015, 09:07:44 pm
0.4 does not register shots as soon as they leave the barrel. Shots are registered as soon as you press your fire key. In a perfect world, this would mean that players with higher pings would just see your shots later.

However, if packets are received out of order, as they usually are at higher and higher pings, then players may not see your shots appeared because the "not firing" packet arrived too early (desync). Or, they could see you shooting when your bullets haven't left the barrel because their "not firing" packet arrived too late (ghosting).
Hmm, I see. I was wrong on my last post then, thanks clearing that up.
However, I would also imagine that jumping RakNet versions and rewriting the entire core would result in some changes in how these situations end up affecting gameplay.
Hmm, yea this makes sense, however I wouldn't be suprised if the fl off was causing some issues. It wouldn't be the first time higher fps' cause issues in online games (cod being an example of that). In VC:MP we already know that it doesn't exactly make a player faster, but in some situations, there's some differences between a player with the fl on and a player with the fl off. An example which you probably already know about is when going "up" a rail, if you have fl off you'll gain alot more speed than if you had it on. An easy way to test this is by going to downtown's police building in the back, and jumping on the rail that's on the stairs to the helipad. When you jump on the rail if you keep pressing W repeatedly, you'll slide all the way up the stairs, but if you disable the fl and hit high enough fps, when you do this slide up the rail you'll gain so much speed that you'll end up on the upper roof of the police building. So I know for sure that having fl off causes some differences in gameplay, I just don't know yet, how much this matters in a battle.

For those that don't know what I'm talking about:

Frame limiter on, 30 fps  (http://gfycat.com/LoathsomeRedAsiansmallclawedotter)
Frame limiter off, 60 fps (http://gfycat.com/BlondCautiousJackrabbit)
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: stormeus on July 15, 2015, 10:43:56 pm
You make it sound like VC:MP has a HaveGlitchersAndLaggersWinFights function, and not that the "higher skilled "players haven't realized that the fire-and-forget shotgun switching style is unreliable now.
Lack of skills can be compensated by lags. You can't deny it.

My understanding from VCDC conversations is that lack of skills is compensated by lag when glitching. However I'm not going to fix anything when the community simultaneously complains:

This especially considering how it's virtually impossible to balance a game where players' pings are as high as ~500 on some servers.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Angela on July 16, 2015, 12:35:49 am
Well, I can freely control my ping, I can make it low, or high easily, but I like to play with lowest one, but If I make it high I will win the VCDC?
some of you wonder about how I control it, right?
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Milko on July 16, 2015, 06:11:18 am
I can change my ping from 35ms to 160ms or 279ms. If I was a contestant, I'd choose the highest ping and win!  O0
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: krystianoo on July 16, 2015, 07:28:14 am
solution? put laggers with laggers and low pingers with low pingers :police: lag compensation

and yeah, there's a lot of issues with 60 FPS on renderware engine if I'm thinking correctly, but I imagine this was the thing with most of the old games ;)
On 60FPS you can flip cars, die from falling down the sidewalk (:D), RW has issues calculating collisions or something like that.

Still - imagine lag compensation in VCMP... it'd be a race who hits who on his screen and runs around till the guy gets shot on his screen, lol
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Angela on July 16, 2015, 09:17:29 am
solution? put laggers with laggers and low pingers with low pingers :police: lag compensation
210W: GENIUS
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: stormeus on July 16, 2015, 06:05:01 pm
solution? put laggers with laggers and low pingers with low pingers

This is how groups would've been arranged without random seeding — organization by timezone. The outcome was that multiple members of several clans would've been lumped into one group (of which only two would advance), eliminating more high-skill players early and having the second and third stages involve more laggers anyway.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: krystianoo on July 16, 2015, 06:14:48 pm
Two leagues:
The Laggy One and The Not So Laggy One.

TLO would naturally had laggers, and the other one would have low pingers.
The winner of TLO & the winner of TNSLO would fight against each other in the grand-grand finale for the first place prize.
The loser would get the second place prize, naturally.
The third place (both 2nd places of both leagues) would fight against each other for the 3rd spot prize.
Well, the who-gets-the-prize thing should get improved, but unless you improve the nolagvslag combat that's a good solution...
at least for me!
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: stormeus on July 16, 2015, 06:31:33 pm
By splitting the tournament between laggers and non-laggers (which might as well be completely arbitrary), you have circumvented most of the point of this event: to bring the community together.

And asking me to fix the "lag vs. nolag combat" is like asking me to make internet packets go faster than the speed of light. There are physical constraints to internet gaming. Either you get inconsistent low ping fights or inconsistent high ping fights. You literally cannot have it both ways.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Thijn on July 17, 2015, 05:53:33 am
By splitting the tournament between laggers and non-laggers (which might as well be completely arbitrary), you have circumvented most of the point of this event: to bring the community together.

And asking me to fix the "lag vs. nolag combat" is like asking me to make internet packets go faster than the speed of light. There are physical constraints to internet gaming. Either you get inconsistent low ping fights or inconsistent high ping fights. You literally cannot have it both ways.
But internet packets don't go over light. They use magic. Don't they?
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: NewK on July 17, 2015, 01:14:24 pm
By splitting the tournament between laggers and non-laggers (which might as well be completely arbitrary), you have circumvented most of the point of this event: to bring the community together.

And asking me to fix the "lag vs. nolag combat" is like asking me to make internet packets go faster than the speed of light. There are physical constraints to internet gaming. Either you get inconsistent low ping fights or inconsistent high ping fights. You literally cannot have it both ways.
I believe the key to these sync issues between laggers and low pingers is balance. 0.3's sync seemed to have this almost right. Not sure if was intentional or just a random fluke (more likely) given how many exploits it had, but it was nice. I guess we never gave it true value until now. Or maybe we just didn't notice that balance was there and assumed it was like that by default or something, I don't really know. But we can't have it both ways indeed. There is no "fix", or magic solution to this. If this is to be improved, I believe balancing is the way to do it. Making a few trades*here and there ,weighing the pros and cons about certain aspects of 0.4's structure and trying new things out. Technically, I wouldn't know what to do exactly since that area is completely out of my domain, so I can't be more specific, and I'm not implying that these sort of exercises haven't been done before either, I'm just asking not to give up on these issues. Because I don't think this is going to be a quick-fix or something that could be solved as easily. I believe this is one of those things that's going to be an ongoing effort to improve. This is also not an issue that will affect the average new VC:MP player as much, but in the long-run it might affect how long people will choose to stay in this community because the longer they stay, the more they'll start to notice these issues. The regular low ping vcmp players are probably the ones that are most affected, I for one, just lost a bit more interest in the competitive side of vcmp. I never found VC:MP to be a viable competitive game/mod because of all the lagg, and now it's even harder as the laggers became harder to hit.

The goal of all this discussion for me was to try to identify what was it exactly that 0.3 had that made the sync better for hitting laggers and why 0.4 can't replicate this. aXXo's theory made the most sense for me. Even though you've confirmed it that the shots are infact registered when the fire key is pressed in 0.4, is it not possible that 0.3 is being "faster" executing this than 0.4? This could result in 0.3 being faster to register the shots and explain why 0.4 feels delayed. It'd be interesting to benchmark this specific part of the code against 0.3's approach.


*What I meant by "trades" is something like: if we knew for sure that 0.4's ghost shot prevention technique (if there's actually such a thing) is causing this bigger delay against laggers, I would gladly trade it in exchange for a better sync against laggers. Wouldn't mind ghost shots at all, if the sync was better in those situations. Maybe it could even be made into a server-side setting or something like that.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Moskvish on July 24, 2015, 07:09:18 pm
Tom , basically we are fucking too much far from the host ! and because of that we pakis are having such worst pings.

i had recently bought a new internet connection and i'm having a nice ping (~170).

If still you had any kinda problem from us so please just sit back have some pop corn and watch :)
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Kelvin on July 24, 2015, 07:19:31 pm
Tom , basically we are fucking too much far from the host ! and because of that we pakis are having such worst pings.

i had recently bought a new internet connection and i'm having a nice ping (~170).

If still you had any kinda problem from us so please just sit back have some pop corn and watch :)

Why dont you try Asia-Pacific Region?
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: stormeus on July 24, 2015, 07:54:59 pm
Tom , basically we are fucking too much far from the host ! and because of that we pakis are having such worst pings.

i had recently bought a new internet connection and i'm having a nice ping (~170).

If still you had any kinda problem from us so please just sit back have some pop corn and watch :)

Why dont you try Asia-Pacific Region?

Because as it turns out, Pakistani internet is so bad, they have no proper route to the Asia-Pacific server. Whereas Indian players can get around 90 ping, Pakistanis somehow end up with worse pings than if they connect to Europe.

I don't mean this as an insult to Pakistan, just its internet.
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: WiLsOn on July 24, 2015, 11:10:58 pm
Why all others paki don't get 150+ ping like me?
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: Davies on July 25, 2015, 12:02:32 am
Why all others paki don't get 150+ ping like me?
Because of city, karachi's ping is almost less than 200 and many players from karachi are getting 140+ ping. ;)
Title: Re: Winner forecast
Post by: stormeus on August 31, 2015, 12:27:34 am
Interesting how this theory is playing out so far. Bryce and Danniel got knocked out. Moskvish retired. AEO is seeded 7th. I'll offer my own bracket predictions later.