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.
