Automate Halfline unfairness.

[Maenara]

In my experience, Iron Will always procs regardless of lag, the invincibility frames just take their sweet time getting there.

[wefwq]

Sometimes Iron Will fail to protect me when i got caught in the middle of combo attacks even the proc animation shown.

[TehCubey]

In my experience, Iron Will always procs regardless of lag, the invincibility frames just take their sweet time getting there.

This. With bad latency, you often see a multihit attack lower your HP to 1, you even get the Iron Will proc sound - but the invisibility frames are not there yet so that 1 immediately gets turned to 0 as the next hit strikes you.

Very frustrating.

But what can you do? It's an online game and servers are in Japan. You'll get lag. You have to deal with it.

[Vampy]

Get rid of monomates if you are carrying them they go by monomate then dimate then trimate even with bad latency you shouldn't die instantly unless it is more than what your HP is.

[Achelousaurus]

But when you get hit hard and you are at like 10 HP, a dimate will not mean you are safe, next hit could kill you.
And if you only got trimates you can get hit exactly 10 times before you have to restock.

[isCasted]

But what can you do? It's an online game and servers are in Japan. You'll get lag. You have to deal with it.

The lag is there, but it's not a reason to code events to go in an illogical order, especially if it is an online game. It doesn't matter if its servers are far away from us, there are always coding standards.

So, now I got some thoughts... Since Episode3 update much more people started specialising into Iron Will and Automate Halfline, so servers started doing additional checks and operations much more often. What if it's partially a cause of the extra server stress?

Some notes about damage calculation:

Spoiler!

Smart developers usually cache stats and multipliers somewhere to reuse them every time a player deals damage to something, but in this game it's possible that every single piece of your gear is checked over and over (it might sound dumb, but it's actually more or less hacker-proof), and so do all possible multipliers.

I am not sure what computer architecture is used for PSO2 servers, but our X86-64 machines are optimized to speed up addition and sacrifice performance of multiplication. This game is a multiplication hell and many multipliers can't be even cached properly. Fury Stance is 1.6x (or whatever, don't feel like calculating) for a player, but for a game it's 1.3*1.05*...*whatever Fury Combo Up is for this particular attack. FCU is not only extremely conditional in terms of coding - it also starts ignoring most of its conditions at lv10 in terms of player experience. Skills like Hight Time are just weird from both perspectives.

Here I'll break down how Automate works again:

Spoiler!

1. Player gets hit, information about it is sent to the server
2. Server calculates the damage and changes HP value
3. Client receives new HP value
4. Client asks server to activate Automate if it has been learned and there are usable mates in inventory (talking about the case when HP is actually below 50%) (also, not sure if those checks are handled by client or server)
5. Server checks minimal mate in inventory, calculates amount of HP that should be given by it, changes HP value and amount of mates in inventory
6. Client receives new values.

The process described above needs to be optimized by throwing out steps 3 and 4 and merging step 5 with step 2. Not only this is going to improve player's experience - it will also reduce load on server. And it is also natural for people's thinking.

Now, modeling situation when Iron Will procs but you still die:

Spoiler!

1. Player gets hit and client sends information about it to the server
2.1. Player gets hit again
2.2. Server calculates the damage for the first hit. It turns out that the hit was lethal, so IW activates
3.1. Client receives new HP value and information that Iron Will should activate. Now player is not affected by any attacks, because invincibility in this game means being ignored by collision detection with enemies.
3.2. Server calculates the damage for the second hit. Oops, IW can't proc twice in a row (or can it? I never had it)
4. Cliend receives new HP value and... dies. Because, as stated above, invincibility is connected to collision detection and so it's fully client-side. Got hit? Get damage.

For that one to get fixed you'd have to introduce an additional check, so it was an extra operation most of the time. But potentially for hits that appeared after one that started IW damage calculation would be ignored completely, so it's not as bad.

But when you get hit hard and you are at like 10 HP, a dimate will not mean you are safe, next hit could kill you.
And if you only got trimates you can get hit exactly 10 times before you have to restock.

This is why Automate is only advised for use with high HP and DEF values. Also, if you know that infected Crys Draal will give you 1200 damage with his attack - you deal with it and dodge.

[Maenara]

Actually, damage is calculated client-side in PSO2, from what I've heard. Which is also one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

[Achelousaurus]

So, IW may effectively do nothing because the server derps out and sets your HP the 2nd time, overwriting the 1 HP from IW with a 0?
._.

Also, the order and formulas for a variety of things is BS in this game.
During my first TD3 when lag was truly biblical I had a Katana Combat lasting over a minute.
But not in one piece, it would be active for 5 seconds, then inactivate for 15 and if I got hit while it was inactive I would die.

Sadly, this could be avoided if stuff was actually client sided. And sadly it's a measure against hacking than, as always, hurts regular players by far the most.

In the end lag wins, period. I tried max Step Advance on hu sub before last week and now that I run around without it, I don't see the difference.
It's unnecessary in general if you know enemy / boss patterns and it does jackshit against any lag.

PS: It's time to update those class build images, UnLucky.
You still got Gunner Sroll as a very good skill ._.

[Maenara]

Unlucky made the class build thread without realizing how much work goes into one.

[Maninbluejumpsuit]

rather than being bound to server lag and stability.

... every skill in an online game is tied to this in one way or another as long as your PC, or w/e platform is a client...